TEACHING STEPHEN KING Horror, the Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature

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ALISSA BURGER Teaching Stephen King This page intentionally left blank Teaching Stephen King

Horror, the Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature

Alissa Burger

Palgrave macmillan TEACHING STEPHEN KING Copyright © Alissa Burger 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-48390-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission. In accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc., One New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004-1562. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

ISBN 978-1-349-69469-3 E-PDF ISBN: 978-1-137-48391-1 DOI: 10.1057/9781137483911

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Burger, Alissa. Title: Teaching Stephen King : horror, the supernatural, and new approaches to literature / Alissa Burger. Description: New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiﬁers: LCCN 2015030906 | Subjects: LCSH: King, Stephen, 1947—Study and teaching | BISAC: EDUCATION / Curricula. | EDUCATION / Language Experience Approach. | EDUCATION / Teaching Methods & Materials / Arts & Humanities. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies. Classiﬁcation: LCC PS3561.I483 Z6225 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030906 For my students This page intentionally left blank Contents

Acknowledgments ix 1 Why Teach King? 1

Section I: Variations on Classic Horror Tropes 2 The Vampire 11 3 The Werewolf 27 4 The “Thing Without a Name” 43 5 The Ghost 59

Section II: Real Life Horror 6 Rage 73 7 Sexual Violence 87 8 Coming of Age Stories 103

Section III: Playing with Publishing 9 Serial Publishing and The Green Mile 121 10 Ebooks 137 11 Graphic Novels 153 12 Conclusion 171

Notes 177 Works Cited 187 Index 205 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments

While the author’s name is the only one that appears on the cover, no one writes a book alone, and many people have contributed to the writing of this one. First, without the inestimable work of Stephen King, my class and this book wouldn’t exist. Reading King and talking about it with students—and having that be just another day at the office!—are a pleasure and a privilege I’m grateful for every day. As long as he keeps writing, I’m happy to be counted among his Constant Readers. I am also lucky to have the support and encouragement of a number of excellent colleagues and friends. Megan Welsh, Stephanie Mix, and Brandi Grahlman looked at early drafts of some of these chapters and their questions, feedback, and suggestions were immensely helpful. I worked with an excellent group of editors at Palgrave Macmillan and Amnet. Thank you, Mara Berkoff, Sarah Nathan, Rachel Crawford, Milana Vernikova, and Jennifer Crane. My family, both near and far, continue to encourage and inspire me. A book has a way of taking small—and not so small—nips of time out of days spent with those we love. Thank you for your love, patience, and continued support, and for not complaining when you get King books for Christmas so I can pick your brain later. I love you. When I get too far into a project or struggle with the inevitable frustrating bits, Jason Burger is there to pull me back out into the real world. I love you and I couldn’t do it without you. Finally, thank you to my students. At its best, teaching is a collaborative effort, an interactive process of critical thinking, discussion, and debate. Thank you for reading, for coming to class prepared, for your questions and your insights. Every day, every semester, I feel lucky to have the chance to spend that time with you, reading and talking, hearing your thoughts and learning together. Thank you for being my comrades in literature and my fellow Constant Readers. This book wouldn’t be possible without you. 1

Why Teach King?

s of 2015, Stephen King has published more than fifty books andevery “ Asingle one [of his novels] has spent time on the best-seller list” (Cowles, emphasis original). His books have sold over 350 million copies and according to Forbes, King “earned $45 million in the 2007–2008 fiscal year alone” (Keneally). He is a household name, synonymous with contemporary horror, and his work has inspired over one hundred film and television adaptations, ranging from excellent—such as the Frank Darabont-directed The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999)—to awful and even downright inexplicable, like the profusion of Children of the Corn sequels. King’s popularity and mass-marketability are undeniable. However, popularity does not necessarily denote literary merit and bestseller status does not ensure an author’s work entry to the academic discussion or the high school or college classroom. So why teach King?

The Debate

In the last few years, King has begun to achieve the type of literary valida- tion and accolades that had escaped him for the majority of his prolific and otherwise successful career. As Jane Ciabattari writes in “Is Stephen King a Great Writer?”, “the respect of the literary establishment has always evaded King. For years, the question of whether he was a serious writer was answered by a quick tabulation of book sales, film deals, income, and sheer volume of output, which added up to a resounding ‘no.’ Commercial triumph did not equal literary value. Being a bestseller was anathema.” The perception of King’s literary merit began to shift when King was awarded the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003 and named Grandmaster by the Mystery Writ- ers of America in 2007, though as J. Madison Davis writes, “Neither award came without controversy” (16). As David D. Kirkpatrick wrote of King 2 TEACHING STEPHEN KING being recognized for his Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, this “is the first time that the organization, the National Book Foundation, has awarded its medal to an author best known for writing in popular genres like horror stories, science fiction, or thrillers. Very little of Mr. King’s work would qualify as literary fiction.” This elite definition of the literary left many critics combative and dismissive of King’s award and within the ranks of the genre fiction so easily dismissed by Kirkpatrick, there was also some resistance to King’s being named a Grandmaster. As Madison explains, King’s work arguably expands beyond the scope of the traditional boundaries of the mystery genre and “King clearly writes stories of sensation and usually includes the supernatural, which is exactly why some mystery writers and readers have grumbled in private about his being granted Grandmaster status” (19). At the core of both of these discussions is one of definition, an inclusion or exclusion based on what “counts,” either as literary fiction in the former or as true mystery in the latter. While the often contentious discussion of whether or not King should be accepted into these hallowed halls rages on, he continues to transcend and trespass genre boundaries, pushing out of the clearly demarcated “horror” box within which many of his critics have penned him, as was recently demonstrated anew when his 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes won the Edgar Award for crime writing. Most recently, in September 2015, President Barack Obama presented King with the National Medal of Arts, honoring King as “one of the most popular and prolific writers of our time [who] combines his remarkable storytelling with his sharp analysis of human nature” (“President Obama to Bestow”). Despite critical objections to King being considered a “literary” writer, his popularity and growing prestige are undeniable. The debate over King’s literary merit has been going on for decades, almost since the publication of his first novelCarrie in 1974, and its most recent incarnation played out in the pages of The Los Angeles Review of Books, between Dwight Allen and Sarah Langan, beginning with Allen’s “My Stephen King Problem: A Snob’s Notes.” King has often been dismissed out of hand as “just” a genre writer and in this assessment his popularity has frequently been marshaled against him on the argument that fiction that appeals to the masses cannot be simultaneously literary. These familiar criticisms are part of Allen’s rejection of King, as he questions why “some people in the literary business regard this extremely successful writer of genre fiction as a first-rate writer of literary fiction, a ‘major’ contributor to American literary culture? . . . [D]o we believe that commercial success on the King scale signifies, almost by definition, quality, the way a 20,000 square-foot house supposedly signifies to passersby that the owners must be important?” Allen also defends the type of writing he sees as truly “literary”—which by definition, within Allen’s argument, King is empathically not—explaining that WHY TEACH KING? 3

“Among the things I hope for when I open a book of fiction is that each sentence I read will be right and true and beautiful . . . that I will be continually surprised by what a particular writer reveals about particular human beings and the world they inhabit. A great book of fiction will lead me toward some fresh understanding of humanity, and toward joy” (Allen). In contrast to this ideal, Allen argues, King’s characters are flat and predictable, moralistically divided into camps of good and evil, his prose is “dull” and his approach to narrative construction “workmanlike.” Allen concludes his critique of King by admonishing readers that he does not recommend reading King “unless you are maybe fifteen and have made it clear to your teachers and everybody else that you aren’t going to touch that literary ‘David Copperfield kind of crap’ with a ten-foot pole,”1 recommending instead authors whom he deems more worthy of the reader’s time, including Roberto Balaño, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon. A couple of weeks after Allen’s article was published, fellowLos Angeles Review of Books writer Sarah Langan responded in defense of King with her essay “Killing Our Monsters: On Stephen King’s Magic.” Langan begins by rejecting Allen’s argument that the popular cannot be simultaneously literary and challenging the dichotomy upon which Allen based his critique, arguing that “Allen’s oppositions—workmanlike/artistic; literary/genre; educated/blue collar, New Yorker reader from Louisville/dumb fuck from Bangor—are contrived. They distract us from real issues by splitting groups that aren’t actually different, or at least not opposites.” At the heart of the debate waged between Allen and Langan are the meanings and importance of literature itself, the impact that fiction can have upon its reader, and the connection possible through the written word. While Allen described his nearly transcendent requirements for the literary, Langan situates her analysis of effective literature a bit differently. While she acknowledges that not all of King’s works are masterpieces, she argues that

[A]ll of his novels, even the stinkers, have resonance. By this I mean, his fiction isn’t just reflective of the current culture, it casts judgment. Innocent Carrie White wakes up with her period and telekinesis at the height of the women’s movement. No wonder everybody craps on her, and no wonder we’re delighted that she slaughters them all. In Cujo, the materialism of the 1980s American family tears itself apart from the inside, as represented by a family dog gone mad . . . In some King novels, the stakes are the soul of the individual—will Johnny assassinate the senator to save the world’s future (The Dead Zone)? In others, it’s the family unit: Will Wendy take responsibility, punch Jack in the face with a cleaver, and save her son (The Shining)? In others (The Stand, The Gunslinger Series, Running Man), he asks, Will we be the heroes of our societies, and start steering this ship in the right direction? Do we have the courage to save the world? (emphasis original) 4 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

These larger themes speak to a common, shared experience of humanity, the existential questions with which we all collectively struggle, combining the immediate and visceral appeal to readers’ emotions with the larger thematic concerns of King’s novels and their connections to the world around them. Another frequent criticism of King is the height of this emotion, which often crosses the border into melodrama. As Langan continues, “No one except King challenges us so relentlessly, to be brave. To kill our monsters. That’s because he’s a believer,” possessing a sentimentality and faith in goodness and humanity that are often transmitted to his readers. As Langan admits of some of King’s stories of world-saving heroism and love triumphant, “even as my intellect rebels, a part of me believes” (emphasis original). This immediacy of emotion, in combination with the rich possibility for critical literary and thematic analysis, makes King especially well suited to reading and discussion, both in and outside of the classroom. At the heart of King’s novels are the characters themselves, individuals who often haunt readers long after they have closed the book’s cover or put down their Kindle. It is because of these characters that King’s appeals to emotion—however melodramatic and schlocky they may at times be—are effective, can capture the imaginations and hearts of readers as powerfully as they do. As Langan argues, “We never forget his characters. They live, they breathe.” King may be best known for his supernatural horrors, but it is readers’ investment with and fear for individual characters that make the terror of his novels truly effective. As King said in an interview with the BBC prior to the release of 2013’s Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining, “You can’t be afraid for the characters if they are just cardboard cut-outs. What I want the audience to do is fall in love with these people and really care about them and that creates the suspense you need. Love creates horror” (quoted in Stock). While the monsters King writes about are often fictional, his characters have the ring of truth, an authenticity that resonates with the reader. As King reflects in “I Want to Be Typhoid Stevie,” “I may have told a few whoppers about ghosts, goblins, vampires, and the living dead, but I like to think that I have told the truth, as best as I’ve been able to manage it, about the human beings that the books are mostly about” (15). In addition to the resonant themes and rich characterization of King’s short stories and novels, King’s work is often dynamically in tune with the culture that surrounds him, from the simple details of brand names and omnipresent popular cultural references to the fears and anxieties that keep readers awake at night. As Ciabattari argues, “At a time when we are barraged with horrifying events—beheadings, Ebola, serial killers, plane crashes, police shootings, mass murders, cyberbullying—his visceral stories provide a catharsis, sometimes even a sense of order. Some victims can be avenged in fiction, if not in life.” King’s short stories and novels work on WHY TEACH KING? 5 a variety of different levels to effectively appeal to and terrify readers: in the common experiences at the heart of many of his horrors, the reader may recognize a bit of themselves, feeling a thrill of emotion either at that resonance or as a result of their investment with specific characters, all while negotiating the larger, real world anxieties of King’s contemporary moment.

Teaching Stephen King

According to M. Jerry Weiss’s educational guide to teaching King’s short stories, “Recent surveys of high school and college students indicate that the fiction of Stephen King is highly read” (2). Weiss identifies some of King’s main strengths—and supporting reasons for his inclusion in the classroom, if not the literary canon—as good storytelling, varied horror techniques, characters of a wide range of ages, and consideration of “the dark side of humanity” and “the fragility of life” (ibid.), themes which often catch the interest and imagination of readers and which similarly resonate through much less controversial examples of classic and literary fiction. There are a wide range of opportunities for incorporating King into the classroom, from the focused inclusion of a specific short story or novel to a dedicated unit or, at the college-level, even an entire single-author seminar on King’s work. This book is organized into three key sections, with each focused on a different approach to bringing King into the classroom, including through connection with more classical Gothic or horror novels, highlighting the wide range of realistically based horror featured in King, and examining the many ways in which King has actively negotiated the publishing process and formats. The first section, Variations on Classic Horror Tropes, explores the ways in which King has negotiated familiar figures in his own fiction. In his critical consideration of the horror genre, Danse Macabre (1981), King outlines the tradition’s key figures: “the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name” (51). As he reflects, “these three are something special . . . [A]t the center of each stands (or slouches) a monster that has come to join and enlarge what Burt Hatlen calls ‘the myth-pool’—that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to films, have communally bathed” (ibid.). King excludes the figure of the ghost from this core lineup because, as he says, “the Ghost is an archetype . . . which spreads across too broad an area to be limited to a single novel, no matter how great” (ibid.). However, it fits perfectly here in a critical discussion of King’s larger literary connections to the Gothic tradition and will be included in the final chapter of this section. These chapters are designed to engage with the larger genre context of horror and the Gothic, connecting King back to the established and accepted 6 TEACHING STEPHEN KING canon, while also highlighting the ways in which he reinvents and reimag- ines those familiar horror figures. This section takes these classic works of literature and connects them with King’s negotiations of these archetypal figures. Chapter Two focuses on the vampire, building upon Bram Stoker’s Dracula to explore King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975), “One For the Road” (1978), “The Night Flier” (1993), and American Vampire, Volume 1 (2010, with Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque). Chapter Three examines the dualistic figure of the werewolf, contrasting Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with King’s Cycle of the Werewolf (1985), Christine (1983), Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990) and The Dark Half (1989). Chapter Four explores the “Thing Without a Name” of Mary Shelley’s Franken- stein to analyze the monstrous undead in King’s Pet Sematary (1983), Cell (2006), and Revival (2014). Finally, Chapter Five draws upon a rich tradition of ghost stories to critically consider hauntings in King, including his novels The Shining(1977) and Bag of Bones (1998). While King is best known for his horror, including the supernatural figures of the previous section, much of King’s horror is based in real life situations and instances of violence. That real life horror often proves an incredibly productive source of conversation in the classroom and over the course of several semesters, many students have told me that these are the stories and novels that stick with them, the ones that continue to haunt them long after they’ve finished reading. After all, these are things that could really happen, anywhere and to anyone. Finally, each of the themes explored here—school shootings, sexual violence, and coming of age—are ones that resonate especially powerfully with the young adults of these high school and college classrooms. Chapter Six focuses on King’s first-person school shooter novella, Rage (published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1977), which he pulled from publication after it was found in the locker of a school shooter, and explores the highly contested connections between popular culture and violence, as well as the disturbing trends of school shootings and rampage-style violence in our contemporary culture. In the early 1990s, King wrote several novels depicting strong female protagonists who face sexual violence and domestic abuse, including Dolores Claiborne (1992), Gerald’s Game (1992), and Rose Madder (1995), and these representations are explored in Chapter Seven. Finally, the adolescent coming of age is rarely clear or uncompli- cated, but instead often fraught with trauma and horror of its own, the subject of Chapter Eight, which includes the novellas The Bodyand Apt Pupil (both from the 1982 collection Different Seasons), as well as the female bildungsroman of Carrie. The final section, Playing with Publishing, examines the ways in which King has engaged in experimental publishing over the course of his career, WHY TEACH KING? 7 especially in recent years. As Ciabattari explains, King “keeps millions of readers engaged at a crucial time in the world of books, as technology continues to transform reading in unpredictable ways. King has been one of the first to experiment with new technologies, coming up with online serial novels and the first downloadable ebook, Riding the Bullet.” King has been consistently prolific since his first publication ofCarrie in 1974. However, in addition to publishing the usual novels, short story and novella collections, and short stories in magazines and journals, King has also been—and continues to be—dedicated to pushing the envelope when it comes to publication possibilities, including his experimentation with the nineteenth-century tradition of serial publishing with The Green Mile (1996); his embrace of new twenty-first-century technology with ebooks, including UR (2009) and Guns (2014), which are available exclusively in that format; and the graphic novel adaption of his own works, from The Stand to his Dark Tower series. A close consideration of these different publication formats creates a unique opportunity to talk not exclusively about the literature itself, but also about the way in which literature is communicated from author to reader, bringing in issues of commerce, accessibility, audience, and constantly evolving literacies. Chapter Nine focuses on the rich history and recently reenergized tradition of serial publishing, including King’s The Green Mile. With the exploding popularity of e-readers and digital content, King has published multiple ebook exclusives, which are the subject of Chapter Ten, including UR, Mile 81 (2011), A Face in the Crowd (2012, co-written with Stuart O’Nan), In the Tall Grass (2012, co-written with Joe Hill), and his non-fiction essayGuns , King’s reflection on gun violence in American culture in the wake of the 2013 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Chapter Eleven examines graphic novel versions of King’s work, beginning with a quick overview of visual literacy and graphic novel terminology before examining N. (2010), The Little Green God of Agony (2012), and Road Rage (2012, co-written with Joe Hill). Finally, the book’s conclusion looks beyond the pages themselves to consider King’s seemingly unflagging productivity, address the interdisci- plinary consideration of film adaptations of King’s work, and reflect upon future possibilities for incorporating King into the high school and college classroom. Section I

Variations on Classic Horror Tropes 2

The Vampire

ing’s fiction is dynamically invested in traditional figures of the Gothic, Kincluding vampires, werewolves, monsters, and ghosts. As John Sears explains in his Stephen King’s Gothic, “Gothic figures, obsessed with death and endlessly dying, refuse to die, becoming posthumous versions of and re-enactments of their own traditions” (68). These familiar Gothic tropes continue to resonate with contemporary audiences, infinitely fluid as they adapt and adjust to meet the needs, anxieties, and tensions of each new age. This constant change reflects their adaptation to “new contexts, in new disguises, [which] suggests versatility, a mobile pervasiveness that insists against its own putative borders” (ibid.). The vampire is the ultimate monster of the liminal space, challenging and permeating borders previously considered inviolable, including boundaries between the Self and the Other. As with the Gothic figures of the werewolf, monster, and ghost, the vampire’s continued impact rests in its constant evolution. As Nina Auerbach argues in Our Vampires, Ourselves, “what vampires are in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have become . . . [E]ach feeds on his age distinctively because he embodies that age” (1). Our monsters are not just those fictional bogeys that go bump in the night, but rather the symbolic manifestation of the cultural moment’s deepest fears and anxieties. One of the first written records of the vampire figure can be traced back to 1725, when an Austrian medical officer chronicled how “the Ser- bian hajduks (peasant-soldiers) under his supervision had exhumed a corpse, transfixed it with a stake, and burned it to ashes. They did so, he explained, because they believed that the dead man had returned from the grave at night, climbed atop sleepers, throttled them, and thereby caused them to die after twenty-four hours of illness” (Butler 27). They referred to “persons of this sort” as “vampyri” (ibid.). One of the first appearances of the vampire figure in fiction is Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s poem, 12 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

“The Vampire” (1748), which foregrounds the sexual transgression of the vampire figure as he seduces a young female victim: “as softly thou art sleeping / To thee shall I come creeping / And thy life’s blood drain away. / And so shalt thou be trembling / For thus shall I be kissing / And death’s threshold thou’ it be crossing / With fear, in my cold arms.” In 1816’s The Vampyre, John Polidori creates Lord Ruthven, an aristocratic vampire, one of whose most horrifying skills is his ability to pass unnoticed among the upper classes and lead others—including the story’s hero, Aubrey—to do his bidding. He is also capable of a more sexual seduction: he marries, then feeds on and kills Aubrey’s sister, while Aubrey dies driven mad trying to prevent the marriage. In the mid-nineteenth century, vampires began to make their way into reading for adolescents in the “penny dreadfuls,” an early form of horror-based comic books, with the serialized Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer, which introduced several iconic characteristics of the vampire, including “having fangs leaving two puncture wounds, coming through a window to attack a sleeping maiden, hypnotic powers, and superhuman strength. Varney is also the first example of a sympathetic vampire who loathes his own condition but is helpless to stop it” (Laming). Sheridan le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla adds further erotic elements to the vampire mythology, introducing a couple of key themes that continue to influence vampire fiction and popular culture, including the sexy female vampire and the vampire as representative of same-sex desire. However, the most well-known vampire novel of all time is Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which more than a century later is still considered the “quintessential vampire book” (Laming). As Scott Laming explains, Stoker’s Dracula “mixed medieval myths and previous vampire fiction with sex, blood, and death . . . [while] Stoker’s vampire hunter, Abraham Van Helsing, helped create a trend for heroes willing to fight the undead.” These vampire figures challenge and obliterate borders, running rough- shod over the boundaries that separate the Self from the Other and the living from the dead, penetrating the body as well as the psyche, and leaving nothing sacred and inviolate. Veronica Hollinger asserts that vampires are more culturally resonant and powerful than other supernatural creatures such as werewolves and Frankenstein’s Monster, arguing that “the deconstruction of boundaries helps to explain why the vampire is the monster-of-choice these days, since it is itself an inherently deconstructive figure; it is the monster that used to be human; it is the undead that used to be alive; it is the monster that looks like us” (qtd. in Duda 12, emphasis original). Attesting to the perennial popularity and constant negotiation of the vampire figure, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have experienced a resurgence of vampire mania, from the action tropes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer television THE VAMPIRE 13 and spin-off comic book series and Blade film franchise to the romantic vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and Charlene Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series, as well as the film and television adaptations each have inspired. Drawing on the traditional Gothic horrors by which he has been inspired and responding to the contemporary discourse surrounding the vampire, King has reimagined the vampire at various points throughout his career and in a wide variety of mediums, ranging from the short story to novel and even graphic novel, including ’Salem’s Lot, “One for the Road,” “The Night Flier,” and American Vampire, Volume 1.

’Salem’s Lot and “One For the Road”

King’s second novel, ’Salem’s Lot, reinvents the familiar vampire narrative for a new generation, transporting the vampire from the shadowed mountains of Transylvania to the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. King views ’Salem’s Lot as an homage to Stoker’s Dracula. Reflecting on ’Salem’s Lot, King likens it to a “game of literary racquetball: ’Salem’s Lot itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watching to see how and where it would bounce, so I could hit it again” (Danse Macabre 26). In addition to reinventing Stoker’s familiar count for a new place and time, King also drew upon the over-the-top, gruesome monsters of E. C. comics, “a new breed of vampire, both cruder than Dracula and more physically monstrous” (“Introduction,” ’Salem’s Lot xvii–xviii). With ’Salem’s Lot, King creates a pastiche of the vampires of the classic Gothic tradition and those of his childhood popular culture, exploring “how Stoker’s aristocratic vampire might be combined with the fleshy leeches of the E. C. comics, creating a pop-cult hybrid that was part nobility and part bloodthirsty dope, like the zombies in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (“Introduction,” ’Salem’s Lot xx). ’Salem’s Lot also reflects the contemporary cultural anxieties Auerbach comments upon, as King writes that “in the post-Vietnam America I inhabited and still loved (often against my better instincts), I saw a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the society around me” (ibid.). In revisiting Stoker’s Dracula, King’s novel echoes the tenor of cultural change while using the shift in setting to highlight the evil lurking behind the façade of small town America,1 upset the accepted vampire conventions, and challenge the collective strength of the vampire hunters. Stoker’s Dracula was set in a time of great cultural and scientific change, and as Carol A. Senf explains in Dracula: Between Tradition and Modern- ism, was a moment poised at “the intersection of myth and science, past and present” (7). The post-Watergate era of ’Salem’s Lot was similarly a time 14 TEACHING STEPHEN KING of dynamic change and uncertainty and King uses the vampire as not only a literal monster, but also as a vehicle to embody “important metaphors of the seductiveness of evil and the dehumanizing pall of modern society” (Winter 37). As King said of the early 1970s cultural influence on his novel,

I wrote ’Salem’s Lot during the period when the Ervin committee was sitting. That was also the period when we first learned of the Ellsberg break-in, the White House tapes, the shadowy, ominous connection between the CIA and Gordon Liddy, the news of enemies’ lists, of tax audits on antiwar protestors and other fearful intelligence . . . [T]he unspeakable obscenity in ’Salem’s Lot has to do with my own disillusionment and consequent fear for the future. The secret room in ’Salem’s Lot is paranoia, the prevailing spirit of [those] years. It’s a book about vampires; it’s also a book about all those silent houses, all those drawn shades, all those people who are no longer what they seem. (qtd. in Winter 41)

In this climate of suspicion and mistrust, the threat is not only external— the coming of the vampire to Jerusalem’s Lot—but internal as well, stem- ming equally from “the corruption that emerges from within the town itself” (Magistrale, Hollywood’s Stephen King 180). Both historically and, even more powerfully, in the national imagination fueled by literature and popular culture, the idea of the small town is cloaked in idealized nostalgia. As Miles Orvell argues in The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community, “Americans dream of Main Street . . . as an ideal place; they have also dreamed it into being, created it and re-created it, as a physical place, the material embodiment of the dream” (7). On the surface, Jerusalem’s Lot seems to be just such an idyllic small town and as King writes early in the novel, “Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. Not there” (’Salem’s Lot 42). However, as Orvell argues, the “glow of nostalgia . . . obscures some of the harsher realities of life on Main Street, realities of social division in the small town” (129). Beyond these common distinctions of class and social status, Jerusa- lem’s Lot hides its own horrors and even before the coming of the vampire, there are everyday evils taking place just out of sight and dark secrets are hidden behind drawn shades, including child abuse, rape, and murder. This chronicling of change is also reflected stylistically in the epistolary approach of both novels. Dracula is made up of a series of letters and diary entries, including those written in shorthand by Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray Harker, Dr. Seward’s phonograph journal, and a range of professional communications, as well as clippings from newspapers providing accounts of inexplicable occurrences. As Leah Richards argues, “As a group of manuscripts from various sources, collected, arranged, standardized, reproduced, and distributed with the intent to inform a wider audience THE VAMPIRE 15 of a significant state of affairs, Dracula is a representation of the periodi- cal, and more specifically the newspaper, of the 1880s and 1890s” (440). In fact, it is Mina’s collation and transcription of the varying accounts that provides the vampire hunters with the information they need to find and destroy Dracula. However, while the transmission of information is more widespread and easily accessible in twentieth-century America, the epistolary in ’Salem’s Lot offers nothing but unanswered questions and a lack of awareness that results in further death. While the epistolary form runs throughout the entirety of Stoker’s novel, the epistolary approach in King’s novel serves to bookend the central narrative, which is told from a third-person omniscient perspective. King’s prologue features a newspaper article titled “Ghost Town in Maine?”, which relates that “a little over a year ago, something began to happen in Jerusalem’s Lot that was not usual. People began to drop out of sight” (’Salem’s Lot 7), with “The list [of the missing] . . . of a disquieting length” (’Salem’s Lot 9). Ben Mears is monitor- ing the news out of Jerusalem’s Lot from afar, from his and Mark Petrie’s latest refuge in Mexico, as two of the town’s few survivors who, having been outnumbered by the vampires, fled Jerusalem’s Lot. The articles themselves offer very little true understanding of what is going on; instead, Ben has to read between the lines, to see what others can’t—or perhaps more accu- rately, won’t—even with the evidence in black and white before them. It is a series of articles relating strange occurrences in Jerusalem’s Lot, from “funny noises” (’Salem’s Lot 622) in the night to suspicious deaths and dis- appearances from nearby homes and communities, which prompt Ben and Mark’s return to Jerusalem’s Lot. In both Dracula and ’Salem’s Lot, the epistolary format reveals the vampires’ secret to the vampire hunters, though with varying degrees of success: while Stoker’s vampire hunters succeed in finding and destroying Dracula, the articles Ben finds instead underscore their failure in eradicating the danger that haunts Jerusalem’s Lot. Stoker’s Dracula builds upon well-established vampire tradition and the characteristics Van Helsing enumerates have become standard: Dracula is immortal, has no shadow and no reflection, possesses great strength and is “so strong in person as twenty men,” cannot cross running water under his own power, must be invited in, can hypnotize his victims, can be destroyed by sunlight or a stake through the heart, is repelled by garlic and holy symbols, and “can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him: he can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat—the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times van- ish and become unknown” (Stoker 250). King’s Kurt Barlow bears several similarities to his monstrous predecessor. Barlow is ancient, aristocratic, 16 TEACHING STEPHEN KING and European. He and his fellow vampires must be invited in, but those who look into his eyes are unable to resist his power; as Dud Rogers, one of the Lot’s first inhabitants to meet Barlow reflects, Barlow’s “eyes seemed to be expanding, growing, until they were like dark pits ringed with fire, pits that you could fall into and drown in” (’Salem’s Lot 225). The epidemic that begins with Barlow spreads with terrifying and indiscriminate rapidity, the monstrous quickly outnumbering those who are willing to believe and strong enough to fight. However, while some of the protec- tions against vampires hold firm—for example, Mark is able to drive off the undead Danny Glick with a plastic cross from his monster model (’Salem’s Lot 361)—many of the tried and true vampire defenses falter and fail. The cross itself is powerless without the belief to support it, as Father Callahan finds when he attempts to stand against Barlow, undone by his wavering faith (’Salem’s Lot 525). A prisoner in Dracula’s castle, Harker laments that “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (Stoker 37). While the concept and historical moment of “modernity” has changed in ’Salem’s Lot, the overwhelming power of the vampire remains; the isolation and skepticism of modern life in Jerusalem’s Lot provides the vampire hunters with no new tools for fighting against Barlow and, compounding the horror, many of the traditional means prove ineffective. In’Salem’s Lot, the struggle is unwinnable because, as King reflects, “the garlic doesn’t work, the cross doesn’t work, the running water doesn’t work, the stake doesn’t work, nothing works: and basically you’re fucked. There’s nothing you can do” (qtd. in Auerbach 160, emphasis original). Even when Ben stakes Barlow, watching the head vampire’s body disintegrate into nothingness, this fails to truly destroy his terrifying power. With Barlow reduced to nothing but a handful of teeth, even these meager remains retain Barlow’s power and hate as “they twisted in [Ben’s] hand like tiny white animals, trying to come together and bite” (’Salem’s Lot 617). Finally, even after Barlow’s destruction, the vampires he has created remain, stalking the night, feeding on the inhabitants of nearby areas, even after the town itself has been largely deserted. In Dracula, the vampire is defeated only through the collective power of the vampire hunters, what Van Helsing calls “the power of combination” (Stoker 251). All of their insights and written accounts are necessary to identify and locate the threat, illuminated by Mina’s transcription and collation of the various letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts. Each of the vampire hunters brings a unique contribution to their shared effort: Harker’s knowledge of the law and personal experience in Transylvania, Mina’s quick mind and organizational skills, Dr. John Seward’s medical and psychological expertise, Arthur Holmwood’s wealth and aristocratic position, and Quincey Morris’s daring and bravery. They are led by Van Helsing, THE VAMPIRE 17 with his intimate knowledge of the supernatural threat, and his own personal “power of combination,” as “a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day . . . [with] an absolutely open mind” (Stoker 119). In fact, the greatest threat to their individual and collective safety comes when they are separated, when Van Helsing excludes Mina from their discussion and planning on account of her gender, leaving her alone and vulnerable to the Count’s predations. ’Salem’s Lot also brings together an eclectic crew of vampire hunters, each with their own unique set of skills: author Ben Mears, English teacher Matt Burke, medical doctor Jimmy Cody, monster aficionado Mark Petrie, and Father Cal- lahan. However, “’Salem’s Lot produces no Van Helsings” (Auerbach 159), no one who truly knows the vampires beyond their own limited scope of expertise, whether literary, medical, or pop cultural. While King’s vampire hunters quickly become believers, none of them has the Renaissance-man knowledge or wealth of experience Van Helsing possesses. They are finding their way in the dark, through trial and error, and unlike Stoker’s vampire hunters, those of Jerusalem’s Lot never come together as a cohesive group— they are, in fact, never all together in the same place at the same time—with Barlow picking them off one by one until only Ben and Mark remain, forced to flee. In the end, Ben and Mark fail to defeat the vampire threat and as Sears argues, “King’s version of the vampire in this novel expresses the negative, pessimistic fulfillment of this myth.’Salem’s Lot is a novel of failure and despair, the failure of belief and faith . . . the failure of Fathers to rule and of heterosexual love to redeem and, in its representation of the undead and their uncanny, persistent afterlives, a novel of the failure of endings” (Sears 18). Unlike Dracula’s death and Mina’s return to a state of grace at the end of Stoker’s novel, the horrors of Jerusalem’s Lot prove indestructible. King’s short story “One for the Road,” which was included in his first short story collection, Night Shift, underscores this sense of dark hopelessness and futility. “One for the Road” takes place two years after the purify- ing fire that Ben and Mark set and which has obviously not achieved its intended purpose. Booth, the first-person narrator of “One for the Road” reflects that “two years ago, in the span of one dark October month, the Lot went bad” (“One for the Road” 302). A few months later, “the town burned flat . . . It burned out of control for three days. After that, for a time, things were better. And then they started again” (ibid.). Jerusalem’s Lot is drawn back to the forefront for Booth and his friend Tookey when a traveler comes rushing into Tookey’s Bar in the midst of a blizzard after he and his family went off the road in the storm. Venturing out into the storm with the out-of-towner Gerard Lumley, Booth and Tookey steel themselves for the worst, on high alert and armed with brandy and religious totems, including Booth’s crucifix and Tookey’s family Bible. As Booth explains, “I was born 18 TEACHING STEPHEN KING and raised Congregational, but most folks who live around the Lot wear something—crucifix, St. Christopher’s medal, rosary, something” (ibid.). As the men set out, they try to warm Lumley, telling him that if they don’t find his wife and daughter in the car, they’ll go for the sheriff and if they see anyone, “we’re not going to talk to them. Not even if they talk to us” (“One for the Road” 306). Just as Booth and Tookey fear, when they find Janie and Francie Lumley, it’s too late. Lumley’s wife Janie calls to him from across the snow and when he goes to her, “she grinned [and] you could see how long her teeth had become. She wasn’t human anymore. She was a dead thing somehow come back to life in this black howling storm” (“One for the Road” 310). Janie falls upon her husband and when Booth and Tookey turn to flee, they find Lumley’s daughter, Francie—or rather, the monster that Francie, like her mother, has become. They make their escape, saved by Tookey’s mother’s Bible, though it is a near thing; Tookey suffers a heart attack in the process and years later, the nightmare still haunts Booth. Echoing the direct address of “you” that punctuates “The Lot” chapters of ’Salem’s Lot, Booth ends by offering sage words to the reader: “my advice to you is to keep right on moving north. Whatever you do, don’t go up that road to Jerusalem’s Lot . . . Especially not after dark” (“One for the Road” 312). Like Ben and Mark, Booth and Tookey fought and won a small victory: their own survival. However, neither duo has been able to truly defeat the horror that lurks in Jerusalem’s Lot.

“The Night Flier”

While the distinction between human and monstrous is clearly demarcated in ’Salem’s Lot and “One for the Road,” in King’s story “The Night Flier,” protagonist Richard Dees must face the ways in which he himself is not so different from the monster he pursues, blurring the lines between the human and the inhuman. Dees is a journalist for a salacious tabloid called Inside View, which puts a premium on scandal and gore, with little concern for journalistic accuracy or integrity. Like the vampire itself, Inside View feeds upon the misery and carnage of the world around it, zooming in on the bloody aftermath of tragedy for the prurient titillation of its readers. Dees is on the trail of a monster dubbed “the Night Flier,” a presumed serial killer who has left death in his wake at one airport after another. In his quest for a photograph of the Night Flier, Dees is staying true to “the things that had made Inside View a success in the first place: the buckets of blood and guts by the handful” (“Night Flier” 117). The tabloids, their mass-marketed horrors, and the readers who consume them are parasitic, their clamoring demand sending Dees and others like him out in search of human misery to meet their endless need. THE VAMPIRE 19

While the vampire and human, the hunter and hunted, are often shown as diametrically opposed, from early in “The Night Flier” Dees is implicitly likened to the vampire himself through the use of blood imagery, depicted as a predator hunting down the prey of the story he seeks. He begins to track the story and, as a journalist “made for sniffing blood and guts” (“Night Flier” 118, emphasis original), Dees feels the old, familiar charge of a juicy lead and “the old smell of blood was back in his nose, strong and bitterly compelling, and for the time being he only wanted to follow it all the way to the end” (“Night Flier” 113). Driven by this hunger—in this case for the both metaphorical and literal “blood” that Inside View’s readers crave—Dees is a hunter, willing do anything and sacrifice anyone to catch his quarry. As the story progresses, the similarities between Dees and the Night Flier become even more pronounced and flying to one of the Night Flier’s scenes of carnage, “In the combined light of dusk and the instrument panel, Richard Dees looked quite a bit like a vampire himself” (“Night Flier” 117). Dees’s use of blood becomes more literal when he is forcing a landing at the Wilmington airport, risking his life and the lives of those in other airplanes in his desperate need to land before the Night Flier can make his escape, taking a knife and cutting himself on his arm and beneath his eye to feign injury (“Night Flier” 130). Drawing his own blood, Dees makes himself a partial sacrifice, shedding his own blood— and even consuming some of it when it runs down his face and into his mouth before he spits it out—in the heat of the hunt. Finally, when Dees stands face-to-face with the Night Flier’s carnage, rather than shrinking in horror he feeds in his own way: snapping pictures as he consumes the suffering, the violence, and the blood splattered before him. Running into the terminal, “Bodies and parts of bodies lay everywhere. Dees saw a foot clad in a black Converse sneaker; shot it. A ragged torso; shot it” (“Night Flier” 142). Even when he comes across a mutilated though still living victim, his instinct is not to help or alleviate suffering, but once more to feed, shooting another photo to splatter the pages of Inside View with the blood its readers crave. In his pursuit of the story, Dees is nearly as inhuman as the monster he chases. Despite this callousness and his overwhelming thirst for the story, no matter what the cost, Dees is not a literal vampire and as he follows in the footsteps of the Night Flier, he doubts the true identity of the Night Flier himself as well. Like many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem’s Lot who refuse to believe, Dees feels safe in his belief that the Night Flier is not a real vampire, though he does concede that “the guy thought he was a vampire” (“Night Flier” 115, emphasis original). As with King’s other vampires, “The Night Flier” negotiates familiar tropes. Eyewitness accounts of the Night Flier and the paper trail documenting his movement point toward what 20 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

Dees sees as potential masquerade, playing on tropes and clichés: grave- yard dirt below his plane’s cargo door, a black tuxedo and voluminous cape, and the signing of his name on logs as Dwight Renfield, in homage to the literary and cinematic incarnations of Dracula’s most loyal servant, a combination of the name of Stoker’s madman and Dwight Frye, who played Renfield in the 1931 classic film. However, the Night Flier differs from his traditional counterparts in significant and grotesque ways, with large-scale bite marks on opposite sides of the victims’ necks rather than discrete, side- by-side puncture wounds (“The Night Flier” 127). Dees never doubts that he is chasing a flesh and blood man; while the Night Flier may be capable of monstrous acts, it doesn’t occur to Dees that he may actually be following in the footsteps of a monster until he finds himself face-to-face with the bloodbath of the Wilmington airport. Dees’s pursuit hinges on the need to see, to have visual evidence. He takes the photos that accompany all of his stories and it’s the concrete images rather than the comparatively static stories that keep Dees hunting: “He liked to touch them. To see how they froze people either with their real faces hung out for the whole world to see or with their masks so clearly apparent that they were beyond denial. He liked how, in the best of them, people always looked surprised and horrified. How they looked caught” (“The Night Flier” 135). The photographs are his evidence, his truth, his real quarry. However, in the end, the monster he seeks evades him, even as it stands directly at his shoulder, breathing on his neck, speaking into his ear. Dees is pushed to his breaking point, forced to realize that the monsters he has spent years exploiting sometimes turn out to be real. He can’t see the Night Flier in the mirror over his shoulder, knows that the vampire is un-photographable, and can’t even turn to see the Night Flier with his own eyes: in this case, to see is to die. Dees catches only an incomplete glimpse as the Night Flier destroys his photographs, pulling his film with “a long white hand, streaked with blood . . . ragged nails silted with filth” (“The Night Flier” 145). After years of selling the unbelievable to his Inside View readers, Dees now has his own beyond-belief tale, one for which he has no proof and which no one will believe, though the images seem likely to haunt him for the rest of his life. Though Dees has been irreparably changed by his encounter with the Night Flier, the vampire escapes into the darkness while Dees himself once more becomes the monster. As the only living person standing in the midst of the airport abattoir and with no other suspect remaining, Dees is pegged as the murderer as the cops descend. Dees’s blood is once more spilled, this time against his will, as “the cop was slamming Dees up against the wall hard enough to make his nose bleed and he didn’t care, he didn’t care about anything” (“The Night Flier” 146). Dees has seen the horrors beyond THE VAMPIRE 21 his reckoning that lurk in the shadows and with that knowledge, he has reclaimed some small scrap of his humanity in this knowledge, at just the moment when he becomes a monster in the eyes of the rest of the world.

American Vampire, Volume 1

The first decade of the twenty-first century was dominated by romantic vampires, including the glittery vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and its film adaptations, as well as the romantic vampires of Char- laine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels, its adapted HBO series True Blood (2008–2014), and the CW series The Vampire Diaries (2009–present). However, with the 2010 comic series American Vampire,2 Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque, and Stephen King refused this sympathetic, dreamy vampire by creating a new, violent, and brutal take on the familiar figure, reclaiming it for the ranks of true horror. As King writes in “Suck on This,” his introduction to the trade edition of American Vampire, Volume 1,

Here’s what vampires shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys and only work at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls; boys with big dewy eyes.

What should they be?

Killers, honey. Stone killers who never get enough of that tasty Type-A. Bad boys and girls. Hunters. In other words, Midnight America. Red, white and blue, accent on the red. (v)

American Vampire, Volume 1 introduces Skinner Sweet, a new kind of vampire, with unique characteristics and several twists on the familiar mythology. The individual issues switch back and forth between the 1880s Western frontier and 1920s Hollywood, encompassing the transformations of first Skinner Sweet and later, Pearl Jones. Snyder wrote to King asking if King would be willing to provide a review blurb for the comic; however, taken in by Snyder’s story, King ended up becoming a co-author, writing Skinner Sweet’s backstory instead (King, “Suck On This” v–vi). The result is a back and forth collaboration, with Snyder and King passing the story from one to the other, Snyder writing Pearl’s story—the first half of each issue—and King contributing Sweet’s, the second half of individual issues. Snyder, Albuquerque, and King create a new breed of vampire with Skin- ner Sweet. As Julia Round explains in Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach, “American Vampire is a taxonomy that classifies vampires by nationality; all with different natures, strengths, weaknesses, and 22 TEACHING STEPHEN KING so on” (196). After being accidentally infected by a European vampire in the larger tradition of Stoker’s Dracula, Sweet is “reborn as the next stage in vampire evolution, a creature who is energized by the sun rather than threatened by it” (Lipinski 135), weakest on nights with no moon, and sus- ceptible to gold rather than wooden stakes. Sweet is the only one of his kind, a completely new and unique type of vampire. As Sweet explains to Pearl after he infects her, both saving her life and transforming her, they are an improvement on the traditional European vampires: “Bloch and his kind, they’re like . . . old, broken-down European clunkers, okay? But you and me, Dolly? We’re like shiny new 1926 Fords. Top of the line, just rolled out onto the showroom floor. See sometimes, when the blood hits someone new, from somewhere new . . . It makes something new. With a whole new bag of tricks” (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King 45). Even infection and transmission themselves occur “in non-standard ways, i.e. not by biting” (Round 197), with Skinner and Pearl both infected with a drop of blood in the eye at the time of their deaths and Pearl’s roommate Hattie infecting herself with a knife covered with American vampire blood. These differences, the overwhelming drive for power, and Sweet’s antagonizing of the European vampires set up a dynamic and bloody conflict between the two factions, as each tries to claim supremacy over and destroy the other. This recontextualization also provides the opportunity for Snyder, Albu- querque, and King to negotiate the vampire mythology. As King argues in his introduction, “There’s a subtext here that whispers powerful messages about boundless American energy and that energy’s darker side: a grasping, stop-at-nothing hunger for money and power” (“Suck on This” v). Snyder echoes these themes in his afterword as well, writing that “while [Skinner Sweet’s] is the story of the first American Vampire, it’s a story about us, about Americans, about what makes us scary and admirable, monstrous and heroic” (Snyder 170). Round argues that “Skinner (and Pearl) embody the frontier spirit and the American Dream, with energy and recklessness . . . However, beneath the surface there is a darker interpretation in which the American Dream is claimed to be little more than ‘The Great National Fantasy’” (196), an illusion of power colored with the shadows of passion and violence. As the series continues, taking on a number of different semi- nal moments in American history as seen through the lens of this new monster, Snyder and his collaborators continue to negotiate and explore these themes of nationalism, identity, and the American dream. These new American vampires are different in appearance as well. While the European vampires echo the tradition embraced by Stoker’s Dracula—pale, slightly elongated fangs, largely resembling their human counterparts—Snyder’s American vampires embrace the monstrous. When Sweet and Pearl transform, their humanity is all but obliterated and THE VAMPIRE 23 the graphic novel images are “used to emphasize key points, in particular moments of violence and horror . . . [characterized by] color and excess” (Round 196). Their fingers elongate into vicious, claw-tipped talons, their jaws extend down and forward from their faces, and both their top and bottom teeth become brutal, oversized fangs. As Round explains, “Pearl and Skinner’s physical features are exaggerated forms of the vampire motifs and emphasize the animalistic” (197). Albuquerque’s drawings of these transformations are detailed, delightfully grotesque, and rendered in large scale, often featured in single-focus, full-page panels. The first visual representation of the American vampire is Pearl’s transformation in the second issue, as she seeks revenge on Chase Hamilton, the famous actor who handed her over as a victim to the European vampires; her monstrousness dominates the page, in a panel that takes up more than three-quarters of the page, the only other images being two significantly smaller panels that show Hamilton’s horrified reaction and an explosion of blood and gore as Pearl slashes his throat, while the violence itself remains—at least temporarily—unseen (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King 48). This same issue also features a full-panel of Skinner Sweet’s escape from his submerged coffin, as he explodes into the water surrounding him, highlighting another power that separates him from his more traditional European counterparts. Albu- querque’s first drawing of the vampire Skinner Sweet highlights his face, teeth, yellow eyes, and upper torso, including the prominent muscles and tendons of his arms and his hands, which end in clawed talons, while his lower body remains in deep shadow, a monster bursting from the darkness, simultaneously seen and unseen, visible and yet ultimately unknowable in his newness (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King and 165). While these full- page panels establish the unique features of these new American vampires, multi-panel pages highlight their action and their abilities, showing them in attack mode against humans, the European vampires, and against one another, as Pearl and the self-infected Hattie battle to the death. In addition to the varying historical times of the two interconnected stories, American Vampire complicates the notion of time itself, tying together past and present, the immediate and the recollected. As Round explains the unique nature of the comics format, “the layout and architecture of the comics page illustrates a view of time as a co-present and static structure that we only experience sequentially” (57). Combining image and text, in comics and graphic novels, “Echoes of past and future are used to emphasize key moments or themes” (ibid.), blurring temporal lines. The opening pages of the first issue ofAmerican Vampire negotiate temporal order with what Scott McCloud calls a “parallel combination” of text and image, in which “combinations of words and pictures seem to follow very different courses—without intersecting” (Understanding Comics 154). The first two 24 TEACHING STEPHEN KING pages are characterized by blue and black, deep shadows and the endless desolation of the desert, as a shrouded figure disposes of mutilated dead bodies, throwing them into a pit that already holds several more, obviously an oft-used dumping ground, highlighting a single isolated moment in a much larger, ongoing arc of violence and death. The final panels of the second page feature a close-up of Pearl Jones, first focusing on the damage to her body, then closer still, her eye and a single tear, alongside her whispered imprecation that “I’m alive . . .” (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King 2). How- ever, textually these two pages are largely dominated by an extended series of text box captions that tell a much different story, as Pearl recalls the first film she ever saw, the magic that captured her imagination and brought her to Hollywood and ultimately, her dark fate in the desert. As eight-year-old Pearl peeked through the curtains at the back of a local general store, “on that screen was the most amazing sight I’d ever seen. All these men and women made of light—pictures, but alive” (ibid.). Her reminiscence of her first glimpse of the 1902 short silent film A Trip to the Moon, directed by Georges Méliès, provides the transition, as the moon of her recollection gives way to the moon over the desert, which in turn gives way on the next page to the painted moon on a film studio set three days before, where Pearl and her roommate Hattie are working as extras (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King 3). Skinner Sweet’s backstory also navigates multiple time periods, in this case through the narration of Will Bunting, an author who witnessed both Sweet’s death and the aftermath of his resurrection, encompassing nearly fifty years between Skinner’s death in 1880 and a public reading of Bunting’s novel Bad Blood in 1925. The final page of “Bad Blood,” the first- issue installment of Sweet’s backstory, ends with three side-by-side images of Bunting and his changing appearance over this time span, including 1880, 1909, and 1925, dates coinciding with Sweet’s death, resurrection, and the comic’s present, in which the stories of Sweet and Pearl Jones intersect (Snyder, Albuquerque, and King 32). At the close of the final installment of Sweet’s origin story, Bunting reflects on his motivation in telling this story as his own death nears. As Bunting tells the rapt—and decreas- ingly skeptical—audience, “I’m here tonight because I want it to be known, by all of you . . . that there are monsters out there. Real monsters that walk the roads and rails of this country” (166, emphasis original). The complexity of multiple, overlapping time periods sets up the continuing series as well, which is now in its eighth installment, and features such disparate and far flung settings and time periods as 1935 Las Vegas (Volume 2), the dual fronts of World War II (Volume 3), the 1950s (Volume 4), and the free- loving 1960s (Volume 7). With American Vampire, Volume 1 and the creation of Skinner Sweet, Snyder, Albuquerque, and King create a new vampire by embracing the THE VAMPIRE 25 monstrosity of the old, eschewing the soft-focus romantic vampires that dominated early twenty-first century representations to reclaim the timeless nature of the monstrous vampire, in all his bloody, gory glory. Like the vampires of ’Salem’s Lot and “The Night Flier,” Sweet and his counterparts build upon the Gothic tradition, embracing the legacy of horror which has preceded them, while simultaneously negotiating the characteristics of this familiar figure for a new generation. 3

The Werewolf

he figure of the vampire—and King’s variations on it—is largely one of Texternally defined monstrosity, including fangs and the potential for violently penetrating the boundary between the Self and the Other. But what happens when the boundary being crossed is internalized, between the Self and the Other that resides within? This is the psychological duality engaged by werewolves, people who hide a monster within themselves. That intimate relationship with the Self, the inescapable familiarity, is what makes the werewolf particularly terrifying. As King argues of the werewolf in Danse Macabre, “Here is the beast caught in the act of pulling down its weak and unsuspecting prey, acting not with cunning and intelligence but only with stupid, nihilistic violence. Can anything be worse? Yes, apparently one thing: his face is not so terribly different from the face you and I see in the bathroom mirror each morning” (75). Therein lies the particular fascination of the werewolf figure: the vampire, the “Thing Without a Name,” and even the ghost are clearly Other, not us; while they may have once been human, they are no longer. We are alive, while they are dead; we are human, while they are monsters. But the werewolf is the darker part of the human psyche, the part kept hidden from the world but which, in the form of the werewolf, breaks out to run amok, leaving violence and destruction in its wake. The werewolf is human, but one with a monster inside: often undetectable, uncontrollable, and for its host, inescapable, except through death. At the base of this discussion of duality and the werewolf are Sigmund Freud and his structural theory of personality. Freud argued that the personality is made up of three distinct, though interacting, parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. According to Freud, “The ego represents that which may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions” (19). As Kendra Cherry explains, the id is the primitive nature of the individual, unconscious and instinctive, with its foundation 28 TEACHING STEPHEN KING in the pleasure principle, “which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state [of] anxiety or tension.” This makes sense for infants, who have no other way of interacting with or understanding the world, but as individuals grow and mature, their personalities develop further, as does the complexity of their interactions with the rest of the world, which leads to the development of the ego and superego. Cherry goes on to explain, “The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality.” In contrast with the pleasure principle that drives the id, the reality principle “strives to satisfy the id’s desires in realistic and socially appropriate ways. The reality principle weighs the costs and benefits of an action before deciding to act upon or abandon impulses.” Finally, the superego can be seen as a process of socialization, through which individuals learn what is acceptable and morally right within the parameters of their surrounding society, then govern their behaviors accordingly. As Cherry explains, “The superego is the aspect of personality that holds all of our internalized moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both parents and society—our sense of right and wrong.” Freud’s structural theory of personality is one of moderation, negotiation, and repression of antisocial, pleasure-hungry impulses. With Gothic duality and the figure of the werewolf, we find individuals for whom this development has been derailed. Rather than proceeding in the usual fashion from the pleasure-craving id to its more moderated and socially aware balance with ego and superego, the werewolf lives in the id, maintaining it as a fundamental cornerstone of identity, though one which is subsumed and kept largely separate from the day-to-day life of the other, public Self. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the quintessential classic tale of duality. Dr. Jekyll is, by all accounts, a good man and a well-respected doctor who is, in his own words, “inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with an honourable and distinguished future” (Stevenson 78). Despite these many virtues, he also has some undisclosed vices, which he refers to as “a certain impatient gaiety of disposition” (ibid.), and his interest in the mystical and in transcendental medicine at times put him in conflict with other medical professionals, such as Dr. Hastie Lanyon. But regardless of these vices, Jekyll negotiates with relative success between his id and his ego, presenting an acceptable public face to the world. This is also reinforced and rewarded by his superego, in his sense of position as a good doctor, a medical expert, and an upper-class gentleman with all of the social benefits that accompany those roles. But hiding his vices becomes a bit of a strain and in recognizing THE WEREWOLF 29 these two elements of his identity, Jekyll begins to consider whether it would be possible to separate them, thus giving himself freely to his evil deeds without jeopardizing the moral high ground of his ego and the privilege of his superego. As he reflects upon this conundrum,

If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. (Stevenson 80)

In his exploration of this question, we have the creation of Mr. Hyde, Jekyll’s id, separated from the rest of his personality, externalized and independent. As Shubh M. Singh and Subho Chakrabarti explain in their article on literary psychiatry “A Study on Dualism: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in separating the good and evil elements of Jekyll/Hyde, “Evil now does not require the existence of good to justify itself but it exists simply as itself, depicted as being the more powerful, the more enjoyable of the two” (222), and Hyde is set loose on the world to wreak his havoc, while Jekyll and his reputation are safeguarded, kept beyond reproach. Hyde is the diametric opposite of Jekyll: as Jekyll reflects upon his alter ego, Hyde “was pure evil” (Stevenson 84). Hyde has no regard for humanity, which is demonstrated in his violence against others, including the trampling of the girl that opens the novella and the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, which sets the police looking for the fiend. Both of these attacks are brutal and unfeeling, as reported by their respective witnesses. As Mr. Gabriel John Utterson’s friend Mr. Enfield reports, Hyde “trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground” (Stevenson 4). With even greater brutality, when Hyde’s path crosses that of Sir Danvers Carew: “Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway” (Stevenson 27). Hyde is pure id, pursuing whatever violent impulse catches his fancy, with no compunction or remorse, loosed from the restrictive influence of responsibility imposed by engagement with the ego and superego. As Singh and Chakrabarti explain, Hyde is “easily recognizable as the id, seeking instant gratification, having an aggressive instinct, and having no moral or social mores that need to be followed. He takes pleasure in violence and similar to the death instinct ultimately leads to his own destruction” (223). On the other side of this dualistic Self, Dr. Jekyll embodies the ego, engaging with his larger social surroundings, 30 TEACHING STEPHEN KING while “the superego is represented by the proclaimed and implicit morals of Victorian society which prided itself on refinement and goodness, and is shocked by the seeming nonchalance with which Edward Hyde indulges in his debaucheries” (Singh and Chakrabarti 223). Despite the clear separation of the Jekyll and Hyde elements of his identity, there is still conflict, struggle, and overlap. As Jekyll reflects upon the baser parts of his own nature, “This, too, was myself” (Stevenson 83). This overlap becomes even more dramatic when Jekyll loses control over his transformations, beginning to change spontaneously into Hyde and finding greater difficulty in transforming himself back into what he sees as his “true” Self. Despite the intersection of these different elements of his identity, however, Jekyll cannot bring himself to take responsibility for the crimes that Hyde has committed. In his confession, he denies these, saying that “even now I can scarce grant that I committed it” (Stevenson 87) and when speaking of these acts he refers to Hyde as someone else, calling him “He, I say—I cannot say, I” (Stevenson 98). The final distinguishing characteristic between Jekyll and Hyde is the physical transformation: while Jekyll is tall, thin, aged, and distinguished, Hyde is younger, shorter, “dwarfish” (Stevenson 18) and “troglodytic” (ibid.). In fact, as Enfield tries to explain and Utterson’s own encounters with Hyde echo, Hyde is a tough man to describe; as Enfield says, “There is something wrong with his appearance . . . I never met a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point” (Stevenson 9). Jekyll and Hyde’s internal natures, then, are mirrored in their external appearances, though the monster also lies hidden behind Jekyll’s own, public face, with Hyde always present—or hiding—within Jekyll himself. In addition to the transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde and the giving way of good to evil, Stevenson’s novella also underscores the breakdown of boundaries that are a hallmark of the Gothic genre. As Cathrine O. Frank explains, “Dr. Jekyll’s story is the story of a door, or several doors: a door that exits on the alley, the door that fronts the respectable side of the house . . . the door of the cabinet that Utterson breaks down, even the door of Utterson’s own cabinet in which he locks away Jekyll’s disgraceful will” (215). These doors are meant to separate the public from the private, con- cealing one’s secrets safely from the rest of the world. Doors are intended to serve as an impermeable barrier, “that point of access and egress, that bar against public intrusion, the closed door behind which the king in his castle rules” (Frank 215). These doors also serve as a productive metaphor for the other boundaries that are transgressed in Stevenson’s novella, including the class disparities and the separation of the different elements of Jekyll/Hyde’s identity. In shedding the burden of the ego and superego, THE WEREWOLF 31

Hyde slides downward not only in terms of morality but also in his class position, as “Dr. Jekyll loses his social standing as a result of his indulgence of his desires and inhabits a working-class body to seek gratification of unseemly appetites” (Danahy 23). The creation of Hyde tears asunder the presumably inseparable elements of the Self, dividing them into good and evil, gentleman and monster, ego and id. The figure of the werewolf epitomized here by Hyde is a layered representation of the darker side of human nature: evil without conscience, uncontrollable, capable of great horrors, the darker side of the Self unbound. King explores this theme of Gothic duality in his fiction, in both its physical and psychological manifestations, with the literal werewolf of Cycle of the Werewolf, the monstrous transformation of Arnie Cunning- ham in Christine, and the more internal duality of dissociative characters in the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, and the novel The Dark Half.

The Werewolf

As Basil Copper explains in The Werewolf in Legend, Fact, and Art, “The legend of the werewolf is one of the oldest and most primal of man’s super- stitions” (24), appearing in oral and written traditions as far back as ancient Greece (Copper 26). Within the werewolf mythology of literature and popular culture, the full moon is the werewolf’s transformational trigger and the only way to stop the beast is with a silver bullet. In addition to tales of the literal transformation of man into beast, these werewolf stories also provided a way to conceive of and respond to the evil and violence of which humans are capable. Take, for example, the case of Jean Granier, a “self-confessed werewolf” in 1603 France, who “confessed to having eaten a baby stolen from its cradle, parts of young children, and to having clawed and bitten several young girls” (Otten 9). These violent crimes of murder and cannibalism are considered clearly monstrous, well outside the accepted boundaries of human behavior and interaction; in identifying himself as a werewolf, Granier sets himself apart as no longer human and, even though Granier’s crimes were treated a sign of mental illness,1 his self- perceived monstrosity provided his fellow humans the cathartic release of seeing him as something else, not like them, the Other. Beyond the physical monstrosity, the werewolf figure also taps into themes of psychological duality. In The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Beast Within, Chantal Bourgault du Coudray explains that while “the causes and characteristics of the phenomenon or condition sometimes termed ‘lycanthropy’ have long been debated in Western culture” (1), with the advent of modernity “the werewolf has also been uniquely implicated in elaborating ways of thinking about selfhood” (3). 32 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

Echoing the structural theory of personality developed by Freud and explored in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in addressing the werewolf figure, “The juxtaposition of the conscious and unconscious . . . under- lines how processes of being and knowing have intersected in modernity, because the conscious-unconscious opposition has become central to con- ceptualizations of self and reality” (du Coudray 5, emphasis original) and as a result, “Representations of the werewolf have reproduced such attitudes, showing the lupine instincts of the wolf or ‘beast within’ (an analogy of the unconscious) to have a damaging and negative impact upon the afflicted individual (an analogy of the conscious self)” (du Coudray 6). King’s Cycle of the Werewolf draws upon many of the traditional characteristics of the werewolf. Given King’s well-known engagement with the larger scope of popular culture and the horror genre, it is unsurprising that the novella “is structured like a B-monster movie, first depicting a series of murders committed by an unknown creature which we ultimately realize is a werewolf” (Larson 103), who in his human form is the Reverend Lester Lowe.2 The coming of the werewolf is sudden and unexpected, transforming the sleepy small town of Tarker’s Mills, Maine into the site of inexplicable horror. As King writes in the first chapter ofCycle of the Werewolf,

Something inhuman has come to Tarker’s Mills . . . It is the Werewolf, and there is no more reason for its coming now than there would be for the arrival of cancer, or a psychotic with murder on his mind, or a killer tornado. Its time is now, its place is here, in this little Maine town where baked bean church suppers are a weekly event, where small boys and girls still bring apples to their teachers, where the Nature Outings of the Senior Citizens’ Club are religiously reported in the weekly paper. Next week there will be news of a darker variety. (Cycle 14)

While King’s small towns are no strangers to horror—as the vampires of Jerusalem’s Lot have already demonstrated—it takes Tarker’s Mills several months to come to recognize the monster that walks among them and even longer to rally against it. As Randall D. Larson explains in “Cycle of the Werewolf and the Moral Tradition of Horror,” “for the first six chapters, the story comprises a series of vignettes, as during six successive full moons half a dozen townsfolk are shredded by the savage beast. It’s in the second half of the book that the characters begin to come to life and the structure of the piece heads toward an inevitable face-to-face confrontation between hero and villain” (103). Just as it takes the townspeople several months to accept the supernatural horror of the werewolf, Lowe himself struggles with accepting his fate. In werewolf legend, there are a number of possible causes that can turn man into werewolf, including eating wolf meat, sleeping outside under the full moon, or being the victim of a malicious curse THE WEREWOLF 33

(Radford), but in Cycle of the Werewolf, there is no clear cause for the werewolf’s lycanthropy, with the random nature of his transformation tapping into a different kind of psychological fear. As Lowe thinks, “This—whatever it is—is nothing I asked for. I wasn’t bitten by a wolf or cursed by a gypsy. It just . . . happened. I picked some flowers . . . I never saw such flowers before . . . and they were dead before I could get back to town. They turned black, every one. Perhaps that was when it started to happen” (Cycle 111, emphasis original). There is no specific cause for Lowe’s transformation and he himself remains unsure of his own monstrosity for the first few months, until he wakes up from a wolf-dream to find the savaged corpse of church jani- tor Clyde Corliss in the sanctuary (Cycle 48). With the words of his dream sermon still echoing in his mind—“The Beast! The Beast is everywhere!” (Cycle 46, emphasis original)—Lowe must face the undeniable truth that he himself is the Beast. Despite their monstrosity, many werewolves are often depicted as potentially sympathetic. As Benjamin Radford explains, “Because lycanthropy was seen as a curse, werewolves were often thought of as victims as much as villains. The transformation from man to wolf was said to be tortuous (recall such scenes in the film An American Werewolf in London), and many sought cures for real and imagined symptoms” (Radford). Michael Collings argues in The Many Facets of Stephen King that “Unlike other creatures of horror, the werewolf is more sinned against than sinning . . . The curse works in two ways. On the level of plot, it transforms an otherwise sane, rational individual into a ravening monster. More disconcertingly, however, on the level of theme and symbol, it divorces that individual from reality, often arbitrarily isolating the afflicted person from society at large and from personal standards of morality and behavior” (78). Most werewolves are unable to control their transformations, whether those changes are triggered by a full moon (as is traditionally the case, a legend used in Cycle of the Werewolf) or otherwise, which raises the question of that character’s agency, their degree of free will, power, and control over themselves. However, Lowe remains relatively unsympathetic because, much like Dr. Jekyll before him, he takes no responsibility for his actions and embraces the opportunity to give himself over to this dark and violent aspect of himself as he “makes excuses for his behavior without fighting against it” (Strengell 76). Lowe is “determined to rationalize his own wickedness” (Larson 106), reassuring himself that “if I sometimes do evil, why, men have done evil before me; evil also serves the will of God . . . if I have been cursed from Outside, then God will bring me down in his time” (Cycle 111, emphasis original). Unlike other folkloric, literary, and popular culture werewolves, where the victim “often struggles valiantly against what is happening” (Collings 78), Lowe absolves himself of any culpability and 34 TEACHING STEPHEN KING gives himself over to the freedom and pleasure of his werewolf alter ego. When Marty Coslaw destroys Lowe, it is with a strong sense of empathy and as he aims the gun at the beast he laments “Poor old Reverend Lowe. I’m gonna try to set you free” (Cycle 125). There is little regret or remorse in this destruction, simply the dichotomous and clear triumph of good versus evil, the monster defeated and the human saved. In contrast, Arnie Cunningham in Christine is much more sympathetic, unwillingly transformed and tortured over the violence this transformation begets. When Arnie first lays eyes on Christine, the rusted and battered hulk of a 1958 Plymouth Fury, he is in the summer before his senior year of high school, unattractive and unpopular. As Arnie’s best friend Den- nis explains in the novel’s opening lines, “He was a loser, you know. Every high school has to have at least two; it’s like a national law. One male, one female” (Christine 1). Pimply, awkward, and perennially date-less, Arnie is Libertyville High’s “loser,” but all that changes with Christine. As Douglas Winter explains, as he restores Christine, “Arnie also begins to change, first for the better—his acne clearing, skinny body filling out, self-confidence growing—but then he matures beyond his years, a teenaged Jekyll rendered into a middle-aged Hyde” (124). Arnie’s transformation has a threatening, ominous undercurrent as he begins to lose his sense of himself and his own identity, becoming inextricably intertwined with the car itself and beginning to take on characteristics and mannerisms of Christine’s previous owner, the foul-mouthed and misanthropic Roland D. LeBay. From the moment he sees Christine, Arnie has to have her, an opening salvo of single-minded obsession that characterizes their relationship throughout the novel. LeBay’s wife and daughter both died in or near Christine—his daughter choked to death and his wife reportedly committed suicide by running a hose from the exhaust pipe into the car3—but despite these tragic losses, LeBay’s single-minded devotion to Christine never wavers, and this is an obsession he hands off to Arnie along with Christine’s keys. Christine drives a wedge into every significant relationship in Arnie’s life, sowing enmity and resentment as she ultimately isolates him from his parents, his best friend Dennis, and his girlfriend Leigh. Beyond this obsession and isolation, Arnie also begins to take on some of LeBay’s habits, wearing a back brace, using LeBay’s favorite epithet of “shitters,” and most significantly, being consumed by LeBay’s volatile rage. Finally, in addition to Arnie’s transformation into—or perhaps even possession by— LeBay, his identity also melds with that of Christine herself, and he loses large chunks of time when he’s with Christine that he cannot later remember beyond sitting behind the wheel or “just cruising” (Christine 200). While Arnie does not literally become LeBay or Christine, as Reverend Lowe becomes the werewolf, he does forge a powerful physical connection THE WEREWOLF 35 with each. Arnie’s resemblance to LeBay gradually grows as Arnie devel- ops the older man’s back problems, injuries he sustains pushing Christine, pouring his blood, sweat, and tears into her with brute force, destroying his own body as he brings hers back to glossy near-perfection. Arnie’s power, his agency, and his identity are intertwined with both LeBay and Chris- tine, as he increasingly loses control while one or the other of these two take over. The power Arnie shares with Christine also taps into twentieth- century nightmares of technology. As Winter explains, in “The machine age . . . individual lives and emotions have become the fuel that services the engines of technology” (122). In addition, as these technologies hold further sway over human life, these individuals often must face the threat of their own dehumanization. As James Egan argues in “Technohorror: The Dystopian Vision of Stephen King,” “the horror [King] evokes often seems inseparable from the dangers of imperious science and runaway machinery of many sorts” (47), including “the debilitating effects technology has on its users” (49). In giving himself over to his obsession, Arnie forges a horrifying bond with Christine. When Christine rolls out on her own to seek vengeance against the bullies who have tormented Arnie and vandalized her, Arnie is not behind the wheel, though it is certainly his rage—so like LeBay’s before him—which fuels her rampage. Just as the werewolf form is, for many of its victims, an uncontrollable state, Arnie has no power over and no memory of what happens when Christine goes driving on her own; she is acting out his most violent fantasies, though he is not the one putting the pedal to the metal to bear down on Buddy Repperton, Moochie Welch, or any of the other young thugs who vandalized Christine. Winter argues that with the technohorror of Christine, “the metaphor for dehumanization coexists with an older, more primeval fear—that of internal evil: the upsurge of the id” (Winter 123). As Christine’s power and Arnie’s all-consuming obsession with her grow, LeBay also rises to the forefront, taking control increasingly often, leaving Arnie helpless and terrified. What began as Arnie’s increased self- confidence and assertiveness quickly rots, devolving into callousness, lechery, and violence. As LeBay takes over, Arnie becomes even more inextricably intertwined with Christine herself, and though he briefly thinks that “if he got rid of it, he would be . . . happier” (Christine 253), their interconnection makes this an impossibility, leaving Arnie powerless to save himself, and while “the car frightened him sometimes . . . He could no more junk it than he could commit suicide” (ibid.). While Arnie’s agency and ultimate culpability may be debatable, his misery is clear. Unlike Reverend Lowe, who happily gives himself over to the werewolf form, justifying his actions and sidestepping responsibility, Arnie is desperately unhappy. In Dennis’s final conversation with Arnie, his 36 TEACHING STEPHEN KING friend struggles to take control, as he pleads with Dennis, saying “I can’t help it . . . Sometimes I feel like I’m not even here anymore. Help me, Dennis. Help me” (Christine 456). Despite this brief surfacing, however, Arnie cannot maintain his control, and LeBay quickly reasserts his power, berating and abusing Dennis, the final corruption of the two young men’s friendship. Finally, also unlike Reverend Lowe, Arnie is sympathetic because he holds himself culpable and fights back. Arnie is too far gone to ever triumphantly reclaim himself—he has given too much of himself over to Christine, has had too much of himself drawn into LeBay’s endless rage—but he dies trying.

The Werewolf Within

King has also explored this issue of duality in some of his author characters, particularly Mort Rainey in the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden (in Four Past Midnight) and Thad Beaumont in the novel The Dark Half, two works that he sees as being quite significantly connected. As King explains in “Two Past Midnight,” the introduction that precedes his novella in the Four Past Midnight collection, “Writing, it seems to me, is a secret act—as secret as dreaming—and that was one aspect of this strange and dangerous craft I had never thought about much” (238). It is this psychological combination of the powerful hold of fiction over both reader and writer that King explores in Secret Window, Secret Garden and The Dark Half. In Secret Window, Secret Garden, the conflict between Mort Rainey and John Shooter hinges on Shooter’s charge of plagiarism, kicked off with the opening lines of the novella, when Shooter tells Rainey, “You stole my story . . . You stole my story and something’s got to be done about it. Right is right and fair is fair and something has to be done” (Secret Window 241). The type of plagiarism that Shooter is accusing Rainey of is of the most egregious sort: taking someone else’s work, putting his name on it, and passing it off as his own. Though it is true that Rainey did not plagiarize from Shooter, his hands are not completely clean, and the first story he got published to start his career was not, in fact, his own, but written by a former classmate called John Kintner. This is one of the most serious offenses an author can commit and Mort thinks to himself that “The most incredible thing was this: he had known better. He had known the possible consequences of such an act for a young man who hoped to make a career of writing. It was like playing Russian roulette with a bazooka. Yet still . . . still” (Secret Window 355, emphasis original). Throughout the novella, Mort refuses to directly address this plagiarism, instead thinking around it before circling back to this initial moment of theft, telling the truth to Shooter when he says he didn’t steal his story but all the while lying to THE WEREWOLF 37 himself as he refuses to remember and take responsibility for the act of plagiarism that began his own career. Echoing this misrepresentation of himself through his work, there are also numerous the issues of identity that are central to Mort’s own internal conflict, the question of who he is, both as an author and as a man. This dualism is multiplied in Secret Window, Secret Garden, with many different compartmentalized sections of Mort’s identity: there’s everyday Mort, writer Mort, the parts of Mort that he hides from himself, and the externalization of John Shooter, a series of schisms that arguably began cracking into distinct personas with that initial plagiarism. Mort believes himself to be an honest writer and a good man, though his first success came from stealing someone else’s words; he believes himself to be a man incapable of violence, though when he finds out about his wife’s infidelity, he storms into the hotel room she shares with her lover, brandishing a gun. In both of these instances, he clings fiercely to his image of himself, with the truth emerging—both to the reader and to himself—in fragmentary snatches. The distinct separation of the different elements of Mort’s identity brings the issue of psychological duality to the forefront. As Mort’s ex-wife Amy discusses what happened with investigator Fred Evans in the novella’s epilogue, Evans tries to explain it, saying that “I know that Mr. Rainey had what was probably a schizophrenic episode in which he was two people, and that neither one of them had any idea they were actually existing in the same body” (Secret Window 377). However, rather than schizophrenia,4 Mort is more likely suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, previously and perhaps more commonly known as Multiple Personality Disor- der. As defined by the National Alliance on Mental Illness,

Dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously referred to as multiple personality disorder, is a dissociative disorder involving a disturbance of identity in which two or more separate and distinct personality states (or identities) control an individual’s behavior at different times. When under the control of one identity, a person is usually unable to remember some of the events that occurred while other personalities were in control. The different identities, referred to as alters, may exhibit differences in speech, mannerisms, attitudes, thoughts and gender orientation. The alters may even present physical differences, such as allergies, right-or-left handedness or the need for eyeglass prescriptions. These differences between alters are often quite striking. (“Dissociative Identity Disorder”)5

Mort does not physically transform into another being, as Reverend Lowe does when he becomes the werewolf, though the man he sees as John Shooter is, at least from Mort’s perspective, an individual completely separate from himself.6 When he sleeps—which he does frequently and 38 TEACHING STEPHEN KING deeply, well-recognized as a symptom of severe depression—he “becomes” Shooter, though he has no memories of this transformation when he awakens, furthering his belief in Shooter as a separate, psychotic antagonist rather than his own repressed guilt and rage. While the conflict ofSecret Window, Secret Garden is one of plagiarism, in The Dark Half, there is a different kind of contested authorship in play, that of the author’s pseudonym, which has particular resonance with King’s work, as he himself wrote several books under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. Writing as Bachman, King published four novellas that would eventually be collected as The Bachman Books (1985), including Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man.7 He also published the novel Thinner (1984) under his Bachman pseudonym and later, after his identity was well-known, he used Bachman again to publish The Regulators (1996, a parallel novel to Desperation, published at the same time under King’s own name), and Blaze (2007).8 King wrote The Dark Half in 1989, just a few years after his own pseudonym was revealed. As Heidi Strengell points out of The Dark Half, in this novel “the Gothic double resides within the Gothic double, that is, the reality of the novel reflects reality. Undoubtedly, both pseudonyms function as a dark alter ego for the artist, a chance to realize his most violent and pessimistic visions” (Strengell 79). Writing literary novels under his own name, Thad Beaumont is moderately successful and his first novel, Sudden Dancers was a nominee—though not winner—of the National Book Award (Dark Half 20, 25). However, Thad’s popularity skyrockets when he creates his pseudonym, George Stark, writing a gritty and hyper-violent series of crime books centered on antihero Alexis Machine. As Thad reflects on this choice in an interview following the outing of his alternate identity, “Thinking about writing under a pseudonym was like thinking about being invisible . . . The more I played with the idea, the more I felt that I would be . . . well . . . reinventing myself” (Dark Half 24). However, despite this commercial success, Thad pulls back from Stark, wanting to reassert his own literary identity, a decision that is further necessitated by an over- zealous fan who discovers Stark’s identity and attempts to blackmail Thad. Thad gives up his pseudonym, publicly and theatrically “killing” and burying Stark in a People magazine photo spread (Dark Half 21–22). As Sears explains, Stark “is a fictional character . . . [who must be] symbolically killed off so that the real writer may live (again)” (62). But Stark is also, as his tombstone epigraph reads, “Not a Very Nice Guy” (Dark Half 22). In creating his alter ego’s publicity biography, Thad gave Stark a dark, violent history, including serving prison time for arson and assault (Dark Half 27). After Stark’s “death,” Thad’s wife Liz remarks that “It’s good to have him dead . . . I didn’t like him much” (Dark Half 32). Except that once created, THE WEREWOLF 39

Stark refuses to stay dead. Stark’s malevolent life illustrates “the horror implicit in the ambivalent power of the writer to create and destroy, the writer’s uncanny ability of self-redefinition and self-naming, and of imagining into existence non-existent beings, events, and places, the power of words to evoke the unimaginable, and the symbolic authority of the written text that overrides, in the moment of reading and writing, that of the real world” (Sears 63). In wielding his creative power—and act echoed by Mort’s creation of Shooter in Secret Window, Secret Garden—Thad’s abilities have outstripped his control, have expanded beyond the point where he can reel them back in. Where Thad is a mild-mannered, clumsy family man, George Stark is a graceful, violent loner, and while Thad wants to establish his success as a writer under his own name, Stark isn’t quite ready to give up the popularity achieved under his. The books Thad publishes under his own name are subtle, literary, and not especially acclaimed, while the books he writes as George Stark are violent, bloody, and twisted, all characteristics Stark himself emerges possessing. While Thad and Stark become, through this mystical detachment, separate men, they also remain inextricably connected to one another. For one thing, Stark’s fingerprints are Thad’s and their voice patterns are identical, forensically tying Thad to the brutal, bloody murders Stark commits as he makes his way to his creator; as Sears writes “Within [the novel’s] detailed police procedural discourse, Thad and Stark are one: legally, and in terms of the epistemology of evidence on which the novel draws, there is no difference between them” (64). In addition, Thad and Stark share an animating life force, one that is not powerful enough to sus- tain them as two separate identities, and as Stark comes to confront Thad, he is decomposing, disintegrating day by day. As two sides of the same man, their mutual survival was effective, with each symbiotically feeding off of and fueling the other; however, now that they are separated, only one can survive. Another significant connection between the two men is that, in some ways, Thad actually likes Stark. Much as Hyde did for Jekyll, Stark is the darkest part of Thad’s own Self realized, without consequence or repercussion—at least, until he refuses to die. Stark frees Thad to give in to his worst impulses, to revel in the mayhem and violence of Alexis Machine without guilt, an escape hatch from the normative strictures of his life as a husband and father, and as monstrous as Stark is, Thad finds that freedom difficult to give up. Thad’s obvious duality is that between himself and his pseudonym, George Stark. However, there is another layer to Thad’s duality and “Like Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, whose transformation is occasioned by scientific explanation, King attempts to establish credibility by means of medicine” (Strengell 79). As an adult, Thad finds out that his childhood headaches 40 TEACHING STEPHEN KING were caused by an absorbed twin that was then surgically removed from his brain, as the doctor excises an eye, “part of a nostril, three fingernails, and two teeth” (Dark Half 9) from Thad’s brain. So in addition to Thad’s psychological duality as he splits himself between Thad Beaumont and George Stark, there is also this internal dualism, the literal existence of another (though incomplete) person within his childhood self. This dualism also ripples out from Thad himself, further explored in Thad and Liz’s twin babies, William and Wendy. As Thad and Liz remark upon throughout the novel, William and Wendy have an intense, near- telepathic bond. They communicate with one another without speaking and play together easily, “rolling a large yellow ball slowly back and forth in the playpen” (Dark Half 104) while Sheriff Alan Pangborn, Thad, and Liz discuss the details of the case. The twins share emotional responses, laughing and crying when the other does. They even seem to have their own rudimentary toddler language: William “cooed, then babbled at her. To Thad, their babbling always sounded a little eerie . . . For a moment it was as if they were holding a conversation in their own private world—the world of twins” (Dark Half 255). Finally, as Thad and Liz find out after Wendy takes a fall, “they share their bruises too” (Dark Half 257), with William developing an identical bruise in exactly the same spot as Wendy’s, even though he had sustained no injury that would account for it. Just as Stark’s means of creation were fantastical, so is his destruction, as Stark is carried away by an enormous flock of sparrows, folkloric “psycho- pomps,” which Thad’s absent-minded colleague Rawlie DeLesseps explains are “those who conduct human souls back and forth between the land of the living and the land of the dead” (Dark Half 314). DeLesseps goes on to explain that sparrows, in particular, have a rather gruesome role as “outriders of the deceased . . . [who] guide lost souls back into the land of the living . . . the harbingers of the living dead” (ibid.). Mystically created, Stark is mystically dispatched, and the darkness within Thad is seemingly defeated. However, when the monster lurks within, it can never really be completely bested or destroyed. Considering Thad, Pangborn thinks

You don’t understand what you are, and I doubt that you ever will . . . Standing next to you is like standing next to a cave some nightmarish creature came out of. The monster is gone now, but you still don’t like to be too close to where it came from. Because there might be another. Probably not; your mind knows that, but your emotions—they play a different tune, don’t they? Oh boy. And even if the cave is empty forever, there are the dreams. And the memories. (Dark Half 464, emphasis original)

Even though Stark has been carried away, the darkness within Thad remains and once unleashed, it can never be entirely contained or forgotten. The THE WEREWOLF 41

Dark Half closes on a victory, but one that proves to be only temporary. As Strengell writes, Thad “is mentioned in a less pleasant context later in King: in Needful Things (1991) we learn that Thad Beaumont has broken up with his wife and in Bag of Bones (1998) that he has committed suicide” (80). Though momentarily victorious, with the werewolf, man and monster are contained within the same body, animated by the same Self, and the horror proves, in the end, to be inescapable. This is an insurmountable challenge faced by all of these dualistic protagonists, from the literal werewolf of Reverend Lester Lowe in Cycle of the Werewolf to the possession of Arnie Cunningham in Christine, as well as the more internalized duality of the author and his creation in Secret Win- dow, Secret Garden and The Dark Half. The monster within often proves the most difficult to defeat, and this victory is rarely claimed without tragedy. In all four of these works, the character must defeat the monster and free himself, a feat that ultimately destroys the man entirely. Each of these men struggles with the question of who he is, how much power he has, and who he wants to be, though that Self remains unattainable except through his own death. 4

The “Thing Without a Name”

n addition to vampires and werewolves, King’s work features a host of Iother monsters. In The Tommyknockers (1987), Dreamcatcher (2001), and Under the Dome (2009), a monstrous alien presence threatens the humans who encounter it. In Cujo (1981), the real-life horror of a rabid Saint Bernard is compounded with the intertwining supernatural horrors of the bogeyman in Tad Trenton’s closet and the dark legacy of Frank Dodd, a serial rapist and murderer whose crimes terrified the community years before, a story which is told, in part, in The Dead Zone (1983). King’s IT (1986) is the monster story on an epic scale, with the horror that stalks Derry taking on myriad faces and disguises, from Pennywise the clown to a giant bird and popular culture staples like the werewolf and the Creature From the Black Lagoon. However, the monster is perhaps most terrifying of all when it has been brought to life by the hand of man, through human machination rather than supernatural or cosmic means. The Gothic monster was brought to life with Mary Wollstonecraft Shel- ley’s classic novel Frankenstein (1818), the tale of Victor Frankenstein, his unrelenting obsession, and the Creature he creates and gives life. In this novel, Shelley establishes a theme that runs throughout representations of monstrosity in literature and popular culture to this day: the interconnection of man and monster, whether in creation, similarity, or both. Victor Frankenstein is a complex character and as Susan Tyler Hitchcock argues in Frankenstein: A Cultural History, Shelley’s novel remains so powerful because it combines two familiar myths: that of the intrepid hero who dares go where no man has gone before and its diametrically opposed counterpart, that of the man who is punished for doing so (4). As Hitchcock explains, “These two archetypal myths are essentially human—and essentially contradictory. One inspires a human being to cross over into unknown realms, and congratulates anyone who does so. The other limits human pursuit and experimentation, threatening punishment to anyone who dares” (5). Victor 44 TEACHING STEPHEN KING begins his experiments in the full knowledge that he is endeavoring to reach beyond the bounds of human knowledge, confessing that “It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn” (Shelley 33) and that “life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through” (Shelley 48). Victor succeeds in doing so, but is then horrified with the result, fleeing from his creation in revulsion, abandoning the Monster and leaving him ultimately free to wreak havoc as he will. A central concern of Frankenstein and the living dead novels that follow it, including King’s, are the intersections of knowledge, technology, and humanity. Victor is so obsessed with whether or not he can attain the knowledge to achieve his macabre purpose that he never pauses to consider whether or not he should do so. He can, so he does. However, when it comes to Victor’s learning and knowledge, Claudia Rozas Gómez points out that this knowledge is of a very limited sort. In her article “Strangers and Orphans: Knowledge and Mutuality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Gómez explains that while Victor’s quest for knowledge is internal and secret, shutting him off from others and the community that surrounds him, the Monster’s learning is interactive, a true quest for knowledge without a fixed end goal, focused instead on continued growth and connection (363–366). Gómez writes that “From early on in the novel it is clear that for Victor knowledge is something that is private, ‘secret’ and waiting to be discovered” (364). As a result, his creation of the Monster is “conducted in the shadow of guilt and concealment” (Baldick 51). In his solitary and single- minded pursuit of that knowledge, Victor absents himself from interaction with others, and by extension from the responses and reactions that could well suggest that this reanimation is not a very good idea. Once he has succeeded, Victor finds himself incapable of understanding his creation, his power having escaped his control, with the impossibility of containment or even clear definition that is at the heart of the monstrous. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues in his introduction to Monster Theory: Reading Culture, a key characteristic of the monster is that “the monster polices the borders of the possible . . . From its position at the limits of knowing, the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demesnes” (12). The monster occupies a liminal position between the knowable and the unknowable, both portraying and policing those boundaries that should not be transgressed. Just as Victor’s quest for knowledge quickly outstrips his common sense and self-restraint, technology creates opportunities for humans to delve into mysteries they may not be fully prepared to consider, a threat that is renewed with each new technological advancement. As Jonathan Crimmins writes, “Frankenstein was written at a moment when matter could no longer be easily dismissed as inert extension. Invisible and active across distances, the forces of THE “THING WITHOUT A NAME” 45 gravity, magnetism, and electricity showed matter to be dynamic rather than inert” (564). Shelley explains in her introduction to the novel that Franken- stein was not wholly sprung from her imagination, but inspired by scientific and technological discoveries, specifically those being made by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who “preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion” (Shelley 8). As she turned to her own tale, she reflected that “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth” (ibid.). As Roseanne Montillo explains in The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Cre- ation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece, experiments with galvanism pioneered by Luigi Galvani and later, his nephew Giovanni Aldini, also challenged the boundaries between life and death. As Montillo writes, galvanism “presented an opportunity for restarting one of the body’s main vital organs: the heart. If that were to happen, the dead could reawaken” (9). With these scientific inquiries before her, Shelley argues, the creation of Victor’s Monster, while imaginative and horrific, was “not of impossible occurrence” (11).1 This anxiety about the potentially destructive and dehumanizing power of technology is not unique to Shelley’s time either; as Thomas Vargish argues in “Technology and Impotence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” “It’s our chief story, a myth comparable to that of the loss of paradise and the fall of man in Genesis. It is in fact our version of that myth, expressed as the fall of humanity from a projected technological paradise into an actual technological crisis” (325). With technological advances coming fast and furious in the twenty-first century, from increasingly complicated cell phones and gadgets to medical advances and genetic experimentation, it is no wonder that the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creation continue to resonate with contemporary readers. As David S. Hogsette argues,

[T]his novel grips our imaginations today precisely because the ultimate transgressive horrors of which it speaks pertain particularly to our scientifically advanced culture. Scientists now hold knowledge that may allow them to do much of what Mary Shelley only dreamed of through Victor’s character. In other words, Frankenstein may no longer be merely a vicarious thrill; it has become, instead, a terrifying mirror reflecting a horrific reality we are unprepared to accept. (533)

What was once primarily speculative horror is now all too close to the reality being continually created by aggressive, boundary-pushing scientific exploration, making Frankenstein still timely nearly two hundred years after its first publication. 46 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

Given this powerful resonance, it is unsurprising that Shelley’s Fran- kenstein has inspired countless film adaptations, reimaginings, and commercial products, from Halloween masks to breakfast cereal, and almost two centuries later, Frankenstein’s Monster is culturally ubiquitous. As Hitchcock argues, “the monster’s story says something important. Other- wise, we would not keep telling it” (10–11). Just as King has been inspired by the classic horrors of Stoker and Stevenson, he has also negotiated and reimagined the figure of the “Thing Without a Name,” in the tradition of Shelley’s Frankenstein. Pet Sematary and Revival have distinct echoes of Shelley’s Frankenstein, while Cell plays with the popular cultural icon of the zombie, the living dead who arguably take their formative inspiration from Frankenstein’s Monster, though they have spread their incarnations far afield in the intervening centuries, from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) to the dystopic reality of AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–present), as well as more insidious explorations of the animated body deprived of the Self, such as Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatch- ers and its film adaptations (1956; 1978).

Pet Sematary

Slavoj Žižek has referred to Pet Sematary as “perhaps the definitive nov- elization of ‘the return of the living dead’” (25). In Pet Sematary, King provides readers with a modern-day Victor Frankenstein in the figure of Louis Creed, a doctor who objectively accepts death as “perfectly natural” (Pet Sematary 55) while simultaneously, as a husband and father, he cannot abide it when it strikes his own family. Pet Sematary begins with the Creed family transplanted from Chicago to Ludlow, Maine and their first encounters with their kindly neighbor Jud Crandall and the dangerous road that lies between their homes. Harried but ultimately happy, Louis, his wife Rachel, and their young children Ellie and Gage quickly get settled in their new home, routines, and relationships, including a hike into the woods behind their house where, led by Jud, they find the eponymous pet “sematary,” a trip which introduces the theme of death in the novel and the multiple and overlapping anxieties surrounding it, from Rachel’s refusal to speak about death to Ellie’s fear that her cat, Church, will someday die. Following an argument with Rachel after their walk to the pet sematary, Louis reflects that “as a doctor, he knew that death was, except perhaps for childbirth, the most natural thing in the world” (Pet Sematary 56), often messy and traumatic, but part of the regular order of things. This is a belief that he holds to steadfastly when Victor Pascow is brought into the university infirmary after being hit by a car while jogging: despite the chaos of the THE “THING WITHOUT A NAME” 47 waiting room and the gore of Pascow’s injuries, Louis remains calm and professional.2 Within moments of seeing Pascow’s broken body, he knew “The young man was going to die” (Pet Sematary 71–72). Louis’s views on the nature of death undergo dramatic revision, however, when death strikes his own family, first with his daughter’s cat Church and later, young Gage. As Mary Ferguson Pharr explains in “A Dream of New Life: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary as a Variant of Frankenstein,” when it comes to death as natural, Louis “can accept this fact in theory; in reality, he finds it more difficult to take” (122). As Louis thinks, “your family’s supposed to be different . . . Church wasn’t supposed to get killed because he was inside the magic circle of the family” (Pet Sematary 121, emphasis original), a direct echo of Elizabeth Lavenza’s comforting words to Victor Frankenstein that “our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection” (Shelley 169). When Church is killed in the road, Jud leads Louis into the woods beyond the pet sematary, initiating him into the dark knowledge of the Micmac burial ground. When Church returns from his grave, profoundly changed but alive, Louis begins to realize that the boundaries between the living and the dead are not as solid or impassable as he has previously believed, a dark possibility that consumes him following the death of his son. Following in Victor’s Frankenstein’s footsteps, Louis finds it impossible to turn away from this forbidden knowledge. As Strengell argues, Victor and Louis are quite similar in their near-identical “refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions and hubris, that is, false pride and defiance” (53). Just as Victor is horrified by his creation, Louis finds the reanimated Church repellant, with his flat stare, smell of the grave, and vicious killing and dismemberment of all manner of small animals, from mice and rats to a large crow (Pet Sematary 173, 190). The truth of Church’s resurrection is that he “wasn’t really a cat anymore at all . . . He looked like a cat, and he acted like a cat, but he was really only a poor imitation” (Pet Sema- tary 254, emphasis original). This dark reality, however, is not enough to deter Louis from taking Gage’s body to the Micmac burial ground, where the power of the place draws him beyond even his most rational considerations. Louis’s interactions with death throughout the novel are characterized as adversarial—with his repeated thoughts of “won one today, Louis” (Pet Sematary 185) when he bests death—and conceding defeat and losing Gage is more than Louis can bear. Pharr argues that Shelley’s Franken- stein revolves around the truth that “uncontrolled science made man more demonic than deific” (115) and Louis follows this same path, and though the power of which he takes control is more supernatural than scientific, once he discovers he can challenge death, he finds it impossible to resist. Just as Victor Frankenstein’s quest for knowledge is carried out in secret, isolating him from those he loves and his larger society, Louis’s 48 TEACHING STEPHEN KING experiments with the burial ground are covert. As Winter explains, Pet Sematary revolves around secrets (135) and the biggest secret of all is death itself, a mystery unsolvable except by those who have themselves died. King echoes this theme of secrecy in an epigraph to the novel, where he writes that “Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret” (Pet Sematary 9, emphasis original). Just as Victor Frankenstein keeps his monstrous creation from his family through enclosing himself in his rooms, lying both openly and by omission, and fleeing into the wilderness to confront his creation, after discovering the dark power of the burial ground, Louis’s life is circumscribed by these secrets. He sends his wife and daughter away to Chicago and reflects that if Gage’s resurrection is successful, they will have to live new, covert lives on the run, separating themselves completely from family and friends, and closing a door on their former lives which could never be reopened (Pet Sematary 311). While the secrecy of his knowledge isolates Victor from his friends and family, casting him outside of the domestic sphere which he has held so dear, for Louis the secrecy threatens to become his life, to reimagine and remake himself and his family, defined by the secret of the living dead Gage. Despite this secrecy, there is an irresistible urge to share the secret with another. As he nears death, Victor Frankenstein feels a desperate need for someone to know what he has done, to recognize his achievements even as Victor himself declaims them, as he confides in Captain Walton. Similarly, Jud Crandall is far from innocent in Louis’s spiral into madness and Sears refers to Jud as “a demonic father-figure” (202). It is Jud who first leads Louis into the woods beyond the pet sematary, not telling him where they are going or why, taking him blindly into the darkness and the unknown, over the deadfall, through the swamp, and up the stone stairway. How- ever, just as Victor Frankenstein repeatedly refers to destiny as pushing him ever onward, Jud’s decision to take Louis to the burial ground may not be entirely his own. As he tells Louis while they walk through the woods with Church’s body, “I hope to God I’m doing right. I think I am, but I can’t be sure” (Pet Sematary 127). Even in the midst of this rationalization, Jud knows the destructive nature into which he and Louis are about to tap and considering the older man the next day, Louis thinks that “the medicine available at the Micmac burying ground was not perhaps such good medicine, and Louis now saw something in Jud’s eyes that told him the old man knew it” (Pet Sematary 161). The burial ground exerts its power over Jud and works him to its will, just as it will soon come to exert that same power over Louis. When Jud later tries to interfere and stop Louis from burying Gage in the woods, it exerts a different kind of power over him, putting him to sleep. Once Jud has passed on his secret and inducted another into the dark mysteries of the burial ground, he becomes expendable, and the THE “THING WITHOUT A NAME” 49 power of the place uses Gage’s reanimated body to murder the old man. It is a constantly regenerating cycle, passed from one man to another and one generation to the next: Jud had learned the way from Stanny B. when Jud’s dog Spot died and Jud teaches it to Louis with the death of Ellie’s cat. In his turn, Louis attempts to do the same to Steve Masterson, who spies Louis carrying Rachel’s dead body into the woods. Louis’s invitation and warnings to Steve echo Jud’s to himself almost verbatim, as he tells Steve that “You may hear sounds . . . Sounds like voices. But they are just the loons, down south toward Prospect” (Pet Sematary 408–409). Steve teeters on the edge of following Louis into the woods but turns away at the last moment, fleeing in terror and essentially erasing their conversation from his mind. However, just because Louis doesn’t succeed in finding an initiate for the burial ground doesn’t mean that its influence has waned. After all, the questions of life and death, of love and loss, are basic human concerns, existential questions of a shared humanity. As Louis walks out the door to face the monstrosities of his reanimated cat and son, King casts a speculative eye toward the future, remaining for a moment within the empty Creed house, which has seen so much love and horror. As King writes, “the house stood empty in the May sunshine, as it had stood empty on that August day the year before, waiting for the new people to arrive . . . as it would wait for other new people to arrive at some future date . . . And perhaps they would have a dog” (Pet Sematary 396). While the power of the burial ground may destroy those it bends to its will through the monstrosity of their own desires, its influence is indestructible. Both Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed also fail to learn from their mistakes. As Pharr writes of Victor and his Monster, “The dream made flesh, then, is inevitably a nightmare, taking the dreamer not to divinity but to infamy, even insanity. And the darkest part of this nightmare is that Victor never really gives up on his original vision” (119). Even on his deathbed, Victor reflects that while “I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed” (Shelley 192), recounting a caution- ary tale to Captain Walton while simultaneously unable to truly repent of his actions. Louis demonstrates a similar hubris and performs all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify returning to the Micmac burial ground. Despite his awareness of Church’s changed return and that “If Gage came back changed in such a way, that would be an obscenity” (Pet Sematary 255), Louis takes Gage to the burial ground anyway, refusing the horrific possibilities and justifying his actions anew at every step along the way. Then, when Gage returns as a cannibalistic monster, killing both Jud and Rachel, Louis refuses this dark knowledge once more, rationalizing his choice to bury his wife there: “I waited too long with Gage . . . Something got into him because I waited too long. But it will be different with Rachel” 50 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

(Pet Sematary 408). Both Victor and Louis have come face to face with their creations and have paid for their mistakes with the lives of their loved ones, but neither can stop themselves from plunging ever onward and claiming power that they know, from their own tragic experience, to be destructive and better left alone. As Tony Magistrale argues in “The Shape Evil Takes: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited,” “Creed’s compulsion to deliver the bodies of his son and wife to the cemetery is not adequately explained as a consequence of his guilt and grief. Rather, he is more interested in continuing his misguided experiment under the irrational premise that eventually he will discover a way to dominate death” (82). Both Victor’s and Louis’s stories remain, in a sense, unfinished. As Pharr argues, they “can have no conclusion. Dreams never do. Victor dreams of successful creation almost to his last breath, and yet he dies. Louis dreams of joyous resurrection in the very face of demonic possession, and still the carnage continues” (124). Once caught within this web of power, it becomes impossible for either man to turn from it and much like a drug addict, both Victor and Louis keep grasping for reasons and justifying their actions as they continue to lay siege to the liminal space that separates the living and the dead.

Revival

Much like Victor Frankenstein and Louis Creed, Revival’s Charles Jacobs has his faith tested by tragic loss and his desire to transcend the boundaries between the living and dead quickly become an all-consuming obsession. In Frankenstein and Pet Sematary, religion was largely an absent presence, hovering around the edges of Victor and Louis’s meditations on death, which are largely scientifically engaged; however, in Revival, Jacobs first enters the novel as a man of God, the reverend of the Methodist church the Morton family attends, introducing the question of faith into the familiar theme of men coping with loss in these novels. When tested by the loss of his beloved wife and son in a car accident, Jacobs’s faith fails him and rather than finding comfort in a Christian conception of the afterlife, he mounts the pulpit one last time to give what young Jamie Morton and other parish- ioners refer to as the “Terrible Sermon” (Revival 66). As Jacobs tells his horrified congregation, “There’s no proof of these after-life destinations; no backbone of science; there is only the bald assurance, coupled with our powerful need to believe that it all makes sense” (Revival 73, emphasis original). This revelation marks the end of Jacobs’s tenure at the First Methodist Church of Harlow and though he later presides over a traveling tent revival as a healer, his faith has been not just tested but broken. In the place of the Almighty, Jacobs begins dedicating himself to the miracles of THE “THING WITHOUT A NAME” 51 electricity. As he concludes his Terrible Sermon, outlining an obsession that will both guide and consume him, “Maybe there’s something there, but I’m betting it’s not God as any church understands him . . . If you want truth, a power greater than yourselves, look to the lightning—a billion volts in each strike, and a hundred thousand amperes of current, and tempera- tures of fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. There’s a higher power in that, I grant you” (Revival 74, emphasis original). Like Victor and Louis, Charles Jacobs seizes the opportunity to use science to interrogate the secrets of the afterlife and attempt to wrest power from death itself. Jamie Morton, who was a young boy when Jacobs and his family came to Harlow, finds his life inextricably intertwined with that of Charles Jacobs, as the two men continue to stumble upon each other over the next fifty years in what the Library Journal’s Barbara Hoffert calls “a relationship that turns positively Faustian” (64). The first time Jamie rediscovers Charles Jacobs, Jamie is a heroin-addicted rhythm guitarist and Jacobs is a carnival huckster, taking “Portraits in Lightning” as Dan Jacobs, though his powers also extend far beyond this entertainment, as Jacobs proves when he administers his electrical treatment to free Jamie from his addiction. Their paths diverge again, though not before Jacobs sets Jamie on a new path with a job at a Colorado recording studio. Though Jamie is cured of his addiction, he has lingering aftereffects. As Brian Truitt explains in his review of Revival, “Charlie’s healing methods aren’t without consequences . . . and Jamie faces demons—both metaphorical and sometimes literal— while learning he’s not the only one affected by Charlie’s strange ministry.” Not long after Jacobs’s treatment, Jamie wakes up in his backyard, poking his arm with a fork and repeating the same words that he found himself speaking immediately after the treatment: “Something happened” (Revival 171). However, as Jamie discovers, he is not Jacobs’s only success story, nor are his side effects the worst of the lot. The supplicants Jacobs has healed at his tent revival—unknowing human guinea pigs for his electrical experimentation—have had a host of troubling aftereffects, including institutionalization, self-harm, compulsive behaviors such as walking and eating dirt, and suicide (Revival 242). While Victor and Louis strove to bring the dead back to life, Jacobs’s goals are even more ambitious: he wants to see what waits beyond the border, to find out what happened to his wife and son. The culmination of Jacobs’s research and experimentation— and one he coerces Jamie to serve as assistant in performing—is the revival of a dead person, in the hopes that she will be able to come back and tell him what she has seen, what lies beyond the veil between life and death. For this experiment, Jacobs chooses Mary Fay,3 a woman dying of mad cow disease, one of the few diseases that are impervious to being cured by Jacobs’s special electricity. 52 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

King’s dedication page at the beginning of Revival includes “a laundry list of horror-genre influences” (Staskiewicz 74), including Bram Stoker, Fritz Leiber, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, and Peter Straub, though the strongest inspirations explored in Revival are Shelley’s Frankenstein, Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, and the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft. Like Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, Jacobs is shaken by tragic loss, and the refusal to accept this loss, grieve, and move on with his life pushes Jacobs to dangerous obsession, including Frankenstein’s theme of the disastrous consequences of “interfering with life and death” (Spanberg). Like Victor and Louis’s rejection of the natural order of death when it strikes those they love, Jacobs longs to strip death of its mystery and power. As he tells Jamie as they prepare to revive Mary Fay, “Sometimes death is natural, a mercy that puts an end to suffering. But all too often it comes as an assassin, full of senseless cruelty and lacking any vestige of compassion. My wife and son, taken in a stupid and pointless accident, are perfect examples. Your sister is another. They are three of millions” (Revival 366). Jamie has nightmares of his dead and reanimated loved ones, including his parents, his brother Andy, and his sister Claire, murdered by her abusive ex-husband; his terror at their decomposed and monstrous appearance draw a clear line between living and dead for Jamie. He knows, as Jud Crandall cautioned Louis in Pet Sematary, that “sometimes dead is better” (166). However, this is a truth that Jacobs either refuses or simply cannot comprehend. Like Louis Creed, while Jacobs has counseled countless grieving family members on the everlasting peace awaiting their loved ones, when it comes to his own dearly departed, this holds no comfort. Echoing the life-giving lightning of countless Frankenstein film adaptations—an added element not present in Shelley’s novel4—Jacobs works to harness the almost unfathomable power of electricity to break those bonds. When the lightning strikes, Mary Fay is indeed returned to a kind of horrifying undead animation. Arthur Machen’s 1890 novella The Great God Pan also features a scientist bent on experimentation, in this case on the human brain. As Dr. Raymond explains to his friend Clarke, who has come to witness his great test, “Thereis a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision . . . beyond them all as beyond a veil” (Machen 10, emphasis original), one which he intends to lift with his experiments on a young woman—again—named Mary. As he explains to Clarke, Raymond is but one in a long line of men who have attempted to plumb these depths, as “the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan” (Machen 11). Raymond anesthetizes Mary and cuts into her brain, and following this procedure, Mary has indeed looked into the world beyond their own and come back fundamentally changed. As Raymond and Clarke look on, “her eyes opened . . . They shone with an awful light, THE “THING WITHOUT A NAME” 53 looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful terror” (Machen 19). The rest of Machen’s novella consists of a series of stories told between men who have seen troubling and terrible things, including suspicious deaths and suicides that revolve around a woman who goes by a series of pseudonyms, including Helen Vaughan, Mrs. Herbert, and Mrs. Beaumont, a woman who “was at once the most beautiful and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on” (Machen 40). This diabolical and dangerous woman is found to be much more: the daughter of Dr. Raymond’s test subject Mary, who he discovered to be pregnant not long after her peek beyond the veil, a woman who is not wholly human. As Lovecraft explains in his Supernatural Horror in Litera- ture, Helen “is the daughter of hideous Pan himself” (83). While she herself is destroyed, there still remains “the horror which we can but hint at, which we can only name under a figure” (Lovecraft 82). As Raymond reflects, “I forgot that no human eyes could look on such a vision with impunity. And I forgot, as I have just said, that when the house of life is thus thrown open, there may enter in that for which we have no name, and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express” (86). Helen Vaughan is destroyed, but the horrifying reality that lays so close to the real world is impossible to contain or deny. This eerie tale of cosmic horror’s influence has extended far into the intervening century’s culture of horror and weird tales, impacting both Lovecraft and King. As Lovecraft argues ofThe Great God Pan, “the charm of the tale is in the telling . . . And the sensitive reader reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to repeat the words of one of the characters: ‘It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world . . . Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare’” (83). King credits Machen’s novella on the dedication page at the start of Revival, capping off his list of horror influences with The Great God Pan, which King says “has haunted me all my life.” The impact of The Great God Pan resonates throughout the whole of Revival, with Jacobs echoing Dr. Raymond’s obsession with peering beyond the veil and his callous approach to the subjects on whom he experiments, considering one life—or dozens, as it ultimately turns out to be—well worth the cost of his single-minded pursuit of this dark and secret knowledge. While Mary Fay’s reanimation echoes Victor’s creation of his Monster in Frankenstein and the impulse to cross these boundaries echoes The Great God Pan, the truths Mary reveals are straight out of Lovecraft’s canon of cosmic horror, a dark reality separated from our own by the thinnest of boundaries, and which spells destruction and madness for mankind. As Daniel Kraus writes, “Frankenstein is a touchstone here, but more so is 54 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

Lovecraft,5 as King edges ever closer to the madness of the unknowable and eventually, to his courageous credit, stares directly at it” (36). As King explained in an interview with Goodreads’ Catherine Elsworth, he “wanted to use Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, but in a new fashion, if I could, strip- ping away Lovecraft’s high-flown language.” Many of Lovecraft’s doomed protagonists find themselves initiated into dark knowledge through reading forbidden manuscripts or books, and Jacobs follows in their footsteps, looking to a mystical tome called De Vermis Mysteriis as part of his research and experimentation (Revival 336). Jacobs plunges into both conventional and unconventional knowledge and tapping into this darkness, succeeds in opening the door between the two worlds. As Jamie looks into Mary Fay’s now monstrous, inhuman eyes, he sees not just the bedroom in which he stands with Jacobs, but “Thetrue world behind it” (Revival 379, emphasis original). Struck with horror, Jamie looks upon “a barren landscape. Barren, yes, but not empty. A wide and seemingly endless column of naked human beings trudged through it, heads down, feet stumbling. The nightmare parade stretched all the way to the distant horizon. Driving the humans were antlike creatures, most black, some the dark red of venous blood” (Revival 379). This conclusion makes Revival “one of King’s most harrowing, most fatalistic works” (Kraus 36), with Jacobs and Jamie denied any small comfort they took from hoping their loved ones had found peace in the afterlife and for their own ultimate ends. As Jamie reflects of his murdered sister, “Somewhere in it was Claire—who deserved heaven and had gotten this instead . . . This horror was the afterlife, and it was waiting not just for the evil ones among us but for us all” (Revival 380–381, emphasis original). As a result of Jacobs’s experimentation, the line between this world and our own has become perforated, with the side effects of those he has experimented upon tying these worlds together, opening the door between the two.

Cell

A popular contemporary development of the figure of the reanimated corpse is that of the zombie. As Kyle William Bishop explains in American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, the zombie film has been a horror staple for more than seventy years and this subgenre has “become even more relevant to a contemporary and post-9/11 audience” (19). Rather than the conscious, if misguided, choices made by Victor Frankenstein, Louis Creed, and Charles Jacobs, the reanimated dead of the zombie comes from without and en masse, an envi- ronmental rather than individually created monster. King taps into this rich cultural vein with Cell, where a cell phone transmission turns all users THE “THING WITHOUT A NAME” 55 into rampaging, violent monsters in a single chaotic moment, as “Every- one who does own a mobile and answers it on the morning of 1 October is transformed into a neck-chomping zombie or a self-harming psycho by something called The Pulse, a mysterious noise or vibration that spreads, virus-like, through the mobile networks” (O’Neill 54). King’s negotiation of the zombie narrative works a bit differently than his other novels, which draw on Gothic literary precedents, because unlike the figures of the vampire, werewolf, ghost, and reanimated dead in the tradition of Shelley’s Frankenstein, the zombie narrative was born in film rather than literature. As Bishop argues, the figure of the zombie is unique in its lack of literary foundation:

The zombie is the only supernatural foe to have almost entirely skipped an initial literary manifestation . . . Almost every vampire movie owes something of its mythology to Bram Stoker, and the reanimated dead have clear ties to Mary Shelley, especially when the creatures share more in common with the living than they do with the dead. The zombie, however, has no ger- minal Gothic novel from which it stems, no primal narrative that established and codified its qualities and behaviors. (12–13)

The cinematic zombie has long been characterized by its walking dead status—biologically dead, though mobile—along with inarticulate moan- ing and an endless, cannibalistic quest for brains. However, the characteristics of the zombie have been dynamically negotiated over the course of its history, such as the fast moving zombies of Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later and an increasing emphasis on bioterrorism and narratives of infection alongside similar reality-based fears and anxieties. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz explain that “The latest mutation of the zombie in popular culture has led to contestations over what, precisely, constitutes a zombie. While lumbering, Romero-style zombies effectively tapped into mid-twentieth-century contagion paranoia, the apocalyptic terror of the living dead was replaced in films such as 28 Days Later and the Resident Evil series with a more explicitly biological model of viral infection” (6). While the modus operandi might change, however, the terror evoked by the zombie itself remains consistent and “the viral zombie does not replace the older style of zombie as much as find a way to reconfigure it in the light of emerging scientific discourses that tap into deeply felt post-AIDS, SARS, bird flu, and H1N1 anxieties. The zombie has been rationalized and assigned a pathology” (ibid.). King’s cell phone zombies or “phone-crazies” similarly negotiate the zombie figure. In the immediate aftermath of The Pulse, the affected humans suddenly and violently turn upon one another, as protagonist Clay Riddell witnesses a man biting off a dog’s ear (Cell 8) and an adolescent girl ripping out a woman’s throat with her teeth (Cell 10). 56 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

The transformation is widespread and almost instantaneous; as Fantasy & Science Fiction’s Charles de Lint explains, “since so many people carry cell phones, when they see the carnage and chaos created by the first wave of the afflicted, it’s only natural for them to use those cells to phone their loved ones, or 911, and so become similarly afflicted” (34). While Cell explores the biological infection pattern of transformation, King also taps into the fear of unknown and nearly boundless technological advancement, with bioterrorism spread through the ubiquitous cell phone signal. As Brendan O’Neill argues, “If Romero’s zombie flicks captured cold-war America’s fears of the red threat from without, King’s Cell captures the contemporary dread of new technology, of what we might be doing to ourselves by pushing the boundaries of science and invention” (54). From the supernatural to biological and technological, the zombie continues to evolve with changing times, the threat of contagion and infection, the disintegration of the boundaries between the living and the dead, between the body and the rest of the world. The zombies themselves continue to develop and change over the course of Cell, with the impacts of The Pulse resembling a mutating virus rather than a more simplistic before-and-after difference. Shortly after the initial Pulse, the phone-crazies begin to travel in organized packs, and as 15-year-old Alice observes, “They’re getting smarter. Not on their own, but because they’re thinking together” (Cell 158), with the survivors concluding that the phone- crazies’ bird-like “flocking” is the result of “telepathic group-think” (Cell 159). The phone-crazies move around during the day and group together in a comatose sleep-state at night, telepathically connecting with one another and a series of stereos and boom-boxes to transmit an easy-listening soundtrack of lullabies. Their powers continue to grow, with the phone-crazies able to infiltrate the dreams of the survivors, take over their bodies to speak and control their actions, and organize to seek vengeance following the destruction of a sleeping flock, developing into a “hive mind born out of pure rage” (Cell 385). Young computer whiz Jordan comes to the conclusion that The Pulse is basically a software corruption, enacted on the biological circuits of the brain, reducing humans to their most basic imperative. As Jordan argues of the phone-crazies, “Those things’re rebooting, all right. They might as well have SOFTWARE INSTALLATION, PLEASE STAND BY blinking on their foreheads” (Cell 204). But as his headmaster Charles Ardai explains, “At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder . . . [T]hat is what the Pulse exposed five days ago” (Cell 206). Though this is a fatalistic, nihilistic view of humanity, King also offers hope for the future. In the couple of weeks following The Pulse, this programming begins to break down, as Clay witnesses two phone- crazies beginning to reassert their desires and ability to speak, if not quite THE “THING WITHOUT A NAME” 57 their humanity itself (348–352). Even as Clay knows that the phone-crazies must be destroyed, he can’t help but see their potential humanity: “maybe in the long run, the phoners would have been better. Yes, they had been born in violence and in horror, but birth was usually difficult, often violent, and sometimes horrible. Once they had begun flocking and mind-melding, the violence had subsided. So far as he knew, they hadn’t actually made war on the normies, unless one considered forcible conversion an act of war” (Cell 439, emphasis original). From this perspective, in the fight for survival, the phone-crazies and the “normies” are more similar than different. Just as King negotiates the characteristics of the zombie figure inCell , this cause also creates the possibility for a way back, deviating from the usually irreversible zombie state: if the human brain can be effectively rebooted, forced to revert to its last workable, pre-Pulse configuration, humanity can potentially be restored, a hope that Clay clings to after finding his transformed son, Johnny. At the heart of the zombie narrative are powerful cultural anxieties about infection, terrorism, and the apocalypse. As Boluk and Lenz explain, “Plague, zombies, and apocalypse are deeply entangled with each other” (7). While the vampire, werewolf, and ghost tend to be isolated occurrences with a relatively limited scope of influence, the rise of the zombie signals the end of the world as we know it, a direct challenge to humanity as a whole. As Bishop explains, “Apocalyptic narratives . . . particularly those featuring zombie invasions, offer a worst-case scenario for the collapse of all Ameri- can social and governmental structures” (23). There is no one to turn to for salvation, rescue is far from guaranteed, and each individual must fight for themselves, either alone or communally, side-by-side with other survivors. The way things have always been or “should” be is inconsequential, for with the apocalypse and the arrival of zombies, there is a new world order to which the survivors must adapt or die. While we have not yet reached the point of a full-on apocalypse, the twenty-first century has seen a range of horrific and world-changing events, both natural and unnatural. Cell taps into myriad national and global anxieties, a supernatural exploration of reality-based terror. Finally, Bishop notes that “the primary metaphor in the post-9/11 zombie world is of course terrorism itself” (29). In Cell, the source of The Pulse remains undefined, loosely attributed to global terrorism, though given the impact and the constant fight for survival, the specif- ics of this terrorism are presented as largely inconsequential, with the true horror coming from the uncertain and dangerous times in which we live. As the New York Times’ Janet Maslin argues, “Stephen King’s Cell invokes the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the kind of disaster in which ‘clothes floated out of the sky like big snow.’ It echoes the upheaval caused by [the 2004] monstrous tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. It reflects the violent anarchy to be found in Iraq. It shivers at the threat of bioterrorism and the menace 58 TEACHING STEPHEN KING of computer technology.” In a world full of these very realistic threats and fears, the supernatural representation of the zombie allows readers to face these horrors one step removed rather than head on, claiming some vestige of control and resolution in a time when they often achieve little of either in the grand scheme of national and international turmoil. The zombie—like the vampire, werewolf, and ghost—is a supernatural figure, though one that, like its counterparts, effectively represents real- life horrors, symbolically conveying the fears and anxieties of its cultural moment. Each of these traditional horror figures has been continually revised and reinvented for a new audience, and the figure of the zombie resonates particularly powerfully in the early twenty-first century. As Bishop argues of the timeliness and real-life correlation of the zombie film, “Because the aftereffects of war, terrorism, and natural disasters so closely resemble the scenarios depicted by zombie cinema, such images of death and destruction have all the more power to shock and terrify a population that has become otherwise jaded to more traditional horror films” (11–12). With novels from ’Salem’s Lot and Christine to The Shiningand Revival, King returns to traditional horror figures, resituating them in our contemporary time and familiar places, highlighting the lasting terror to be found there and exploring the ways in which through these monsters, we find what it means to be human. 5

The Ghost

hile King’s consideration of the previous three figures—the vampire, Wthe werewolf, and the “Thing Without a Name”—each have a single classic novel from which they draw their rich literary traditions,1 this is not possible with the ghost, which King argues cannot be traced back to or typified by any one novel (Danse Macabre 51).The ghost story has a long, rich history, one which serves both to terrify and negotiate human anxiety about death and what lies after. As Otto Penzler explains, “Tales of the supernatural have been a fixture of the storytelling tradition since preliterate times, and the most popular form they have taken is the ghost story” (xi). This spectral influence can be seen in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and in Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey. These ghostly intercessions were also a preoccupation of the Roman Empire, where “notably Plutarch and Pliny the Younger, wrote about haunted houses” (Penzler xi), including the latter’s “An Ancient Ghost Story,” where clanking chains and other ominous sounds lead the narrator to discover a buried body which, once laid to proper rest, sets the house at ease. Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto similarly establishes the tradition of the ghost story and the haunted house, with Manfred and his family cursed by his earlier misdeeds, a series of spectral attacks that only ends when order is restored and the castle is in the hands of the true heir. Ghosts appear in starring roles in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) and Macbeth (1611), and the ghost of Jacob Marley serves as the transformative catalyst that instills Ebenezer Scrooge with the Christmas spirit in Charles Dicken’s classic A Christmas Carol (1843). Transcending historical moments, individual cultural and religious beliefs, and a wide range of literary formats, ghosts seem to hold universal appeal for horror readers, which is no wonder, since the preoccupation with death and what comes after is a universal concern of all humans. As Michael Newton argues in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, “The ghost is a way of engaging with our mystification about death. It survives with the belief that there is something left over when the human 60 TEACHING STEPHEN KING body becomes a corpse, that there is a residue, or a remnant, that does not cease in the moment of dying” (xxi). As a result, Dorothy Scarborough argues in The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, “The ghost is the most enduring figure in supernatural fiction. He is absolutely indestructible” (81). As long as humans must face their own mortality, ghost stories will continue to play a central role in sounding those questions and fears. There are several common themes to the traditional ghost story, including the manifestation of the haunting, which can take many forms, and the interrogation of its causes. In ghost stories spirits take on many forms, including full body apparitions (a ghostly version of the individual’s body), the unexplainable movement of objects, phantom sounds, a breeze without a clear source, and phantom smells, often of scents associated with the deceased, such as cigar smoke or a signature perfume. As Penzler explains, ghosts “may have widely divergent goals. Some return from the dead to wreak vengeance; others want to help a loved one” (xii). If a ghost is a remnant of humanity that has remained behind in the land of the living, dis- corporated following the death of its body, the ghost story often argues that there is some reason for the spirit staying behind, such as strong emotional ties or unfinished business, and oftentimes if that reason can be discovered and addressed, the spirit is free to move on. Hand in hand with the ghost story is that of the haunted house tale. Like the werewolf, the haunted house story comes to readers where they live, infiltrating their innermost private spaces. As Newton argues, “Ghosts are the intrusion—the link—between the private and the public. Their haunting demonstrates that this secure place is not sealed off, but lies open to others, to previous inhabitants, to strangers” (xxvi–xxvii). This is a terrifying proposition, with the realization that we can never be truly safe, even in our innermost sanctums, with the shades drawn and the doors locked. As Dale Bailey lays out the key components of the haunted house story in American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction, at its most basic level, “it must be old, it must be large, [and] it must have a troubled history” (57). However, once past these initial requirements, the haunting is often about far more than just ghosts or rest- less spirits, instead reflecting the conflict within or between the characters themselves, as well as larger cultural themes. As Bailey continues his analysis, there is a wide-ranging “latitude of social and cultural tensions the formula of the haunted house tale can engage. Again and again, such novels touch upon class, gender, history, and economy. Time after time they enact the Manichean clash of good and evil and the tensions between scientific and supernatural world views. Inevitably, they present a view of evil as ever re-emergent” (63). Barry Curtis builds on this complexity in Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, where he argues that “‘ghosts’ and the dark THE GHOST 61 places where they dwell have served as powerful metaphors for persistent themes of loss, memory, retribution, and confrontation with unacknowl- edged and unresolved histories” (10). With this in mind, the haunted house story bridges the gap between the past and the present, with the haunting often signaling a simultaneous enactment of these time periods, as well as revealing tensions and anxieties of its surrounding contemporary culture. Ghosts and hauntings take center stage in King’s The Shining and Bag of Bones, as well as King’s recent sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep (2013). Both The Shining and Bag of Bones are haunted house stories that engage with the multiple levels Curtis addresses: in addition to the haunting, both novels address significant issues of gender, power, and violence; the perme- ability of the barrier between the past and the present; the significance of place in holding the echoes of the pain and suffering that have occurred there; and the responsibility of descendants to atone for their predecessors’ actions and legacies, even when they as individuals are innocent, another theme which signals the breakdown between the crimes of the past and its clash with the individualistic present.

The Shining

King’s novel The Shining is a haunted house story on a grand scale, centered on the fractured Torrance family’s winter stay in Colorado’s Overlook Hotel, where patriarch Jack Torrance has taken a job as the seasonal caretaker, accompanied by his wife Wendy and young son Danny. However, not long after the Torrances move in, they realize that they are not the hotel’s only occupants, with the walls and rooms still holding the memories of the tragedies and misdeeds that have taken place within them over the years. Danny Torrance is especially aware of the ghosts because of his powerful precognition, which Overlook chef Dick Hallorrann calls “the shining” (Shining 114). Before leaving the Torrances for the winter, Hallorann warns Danny about the hotel, telling the boy that “I don’t know why, but it seems that all the bad things that ever happened here, there’s little pieces of those things still layin around” (Shining 125). Dick also attempts to reas- sure Danny, telling him that “I don’t think those things can hurt anybody” (ibid.), though Danny soon finds out that’s not the case. The most terrifying and powerful of the ghosts that Danny encounters is Mrs. Massey, the dead woman in the bathtub of Room 217. Entering the room despite being expressly forbidden to do so by his father, Danny finds a true horror, pulling the shower curtain back to find that “The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny’s, glassy and huge, like marbles. She 62 TEACHING STEPHEN KING was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace” (Shining 319–320). While Mrs. Massey is not the first ghost that Danny sees at the Overlook, she is the first who is able to harm him, who doesn’t go away when he closes his eyes and tells himself he is safe; instead she catches and chokes him, the line between the present and past, the living and the dead, obliterated with this very real, physical assault. Mrs. Massey is only one small part of the Overlook Hotel’s dark and sordid history, a legacy of underhandedness, manipulation, and pain that pulls the Torrances further under its spell as the winter goes on. Discover- ing a scrapbook in the Overlook’s basement,2 Jack finds out not just about the glitz and glamour of the grand hotel, but the scandals as well, including “Mafia murders, sexual violations, and corrupt financial transactions” (Magistrale, “Truth Comes Out” 41). Jack “promised himself he would take care of the place, very good care. It seemed that before today he had never really understood the breadth of his responsibility to the Overlook. It was almost like having a responsibility to history” (Shining 233). The Overlook occupies a liminal space, where the past is alive and capable of violently impacting the present, and the more powerful the hotel’s hold over Jack Torrance becomes, the thinner the boundaries become, between past and present, between the Overlook and Jack, throwing the entire Torrance family into an unremitting and constantly threatening liminal limbo. As Winter argues, Jack “absorbs and is absorbed by the hotel, and the truths of the past, repressed in the dark basement of the unconscious, begin to emerge” (49), awakening ghosts that haunt both the hotel and Jack’s own past. The Overlook’s ghosts are not the only unquiet pasts haunting the Tor- rance family, who bring their own dark and troubled history with them up into the mountains. Newton argues that beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the troubled family” becomes a common target of haunting, as a result of their position “as abortive examples of domesticity. Into their compromised worlds the ghost comes, an undead symbol of their failures” (xxix). The Torrance family is certainly troubled as they head up into the mountains, facing incredible stress, financial ruin, and the disintegration of the martial relationship between Jack and Wendy, as well as that of the family as a whole. Jack is a recovering alcoholic, with a long trail of addiction and violence behind him, including breaking Danny’s arm in a drunken rage and beating a student who vandalized Jack’s car, the latter attack an incident of Jack losing his temper while stone-cold sober. Jack’s position as winter caretaker of the Overlook is a last gasp effort to set his life on track, further establish his sobriety, rediscover himself as a writer, and save his rapidly deteriorating family. Just as the ghosts haunt the halls of the Overlook, Jack’s alcoholism and violence haunt his memories and his family. At first, the Overlook does seem to be a new beginning for the Torrances, THE GHOST 63 bringing them closer together and strengthening their bonds with one another. Early in the winter, Wendy thinks hopefully that “her husband seemed to be slowly closing the door on a roomful of monsters” (Shining 174). If this door can be closed and locked, put behind them once and for all, the future of the Torrance family is full of untold possibilities. However, the Overlook’s ghosts zero in on Jack’s flaws, tapping into his weaknesses in his imagined and increasingly potent conversations with Lloyd the bartender (Shining 350–355), his negotiations with the cold and manipulative Horace Derwent, and his conversation with Delbert Grady, the Overlook’s previous caretaker, who murdered his wife and daughters (Shining 516–522). Playing upon Jack’s addiction, his temper, his self-doubt and self-loathing, the Over- look makes Jack one more tool in its arsenal of destruction. The gender dynamics between Jack and Wendy are complex and often contentious, compounded by Jack’s own sense of emasculation as a result of his personal, familial, and professional failures. As the novel begins, Danny and Wendy have been pulled along in Jack’s destructive—and self-destructive—wake for years. Winter describes this early Wendy as “attractive, frag- ile, threatened—a modernized Gothic heroine” (48). She stays with Jack in spite of his drinking and its destructive impact on their marriage, even after he breaks their son’s arm. In Jack’s perception of himself and his life, Wendy is often at the periphery, a shrill and nagging nuisance, constantly challenging him, judging him and finding him wanting. Women hold a similarly tangential position in the Overlook’s history, which is dominated by men’s passions, though at the Overlook, women rarely stray beyond their “proper place,” instead confined within the misogynistic gender roles demarcated by systems of power, money, and violence. As Magistrale argues in “‘Truth Comes Out’: The Scrapbook Chapter,” “Men have owned and managed the Overlook; men created its notorious reputation. Women are references in the scrapbook (and elsewhere throughout the novel) only as glittering ghosts—whores and decadent dolls wearing ‘gleaming high-heeled pumps,’ perfumed and naked beneath tight evening gowns and cat-masks, who are present only to enflame the masculine libido” (43). As Jack falls further under the Overlook’s influence, he pushes Wendy away, their fights becoming increasingly volatile until he attempts to kill her, trying to beat her to death with a roque mallet. Abused and afraid, it would be easy for Wendy to be first overcome and then destroyed by her husband; however, she rises above this violence, willing to sacrifice herself to save her son, and growing stronger as a result of her suffering. As Sidney Poger writes in “Charac- ter Transformation in The Shining,” Wendy’s metamorphosis is achieved when she fights, a choice which leads her to “change from a dependent wife and mother, content to see her son more in love with his father than with her, to a primal mother. Wendy is transformed, and we have witnessed 64 TEACHING STEPHEN KING the transformation in her battle with Jack. She has fought through broken ribs, broken vertebrae, and broken back to become the woman she had the potential for becoming” (52–53). Danny and Wendy are irrevocably transformed by their experiences within the Overlook, claiming power that they never knew they had, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds and in direct challenge to the Overlook’s violent, patriarchal, and misogynistic history. Jack’s ghosts are not his alone, but rather a legacy—or haunting—from his own childhood, lived in fear of his father, a mercurial alcoholic who could be both loving and violent, sometimes simultaneously. Despite young Jack’s devotion, “Love began to curdle at nine, when his father put his mother in the hospital with his cane” (Shining 329), randomly and without provocation beating her into unconsciousness at the dinner table. When the doctor arrives, Jack’s father tells him that she fell down the stairs, a lie which is not believed but accepted, and the catalyst for their family’s destruction when “in the hospital, their mother had corroborated their father’s story while holding the hand of the parish priest” (Shining 332). Jack’s father’s violence is further explored in the prequel “Before the Play,” portions of which were published in TV Guide before the premiere of the 1997 miniseries adaptation of The Shining, which was written by King and directed by Mick Garris.3 As King writes in “Before the Play,” “In that long, hot summer of 1953, the summer Jacky Torrance turned 6, his father came home one night from the hospital [where he worked] and broke Jacky’s arm. He was drunk” (52). In a well-established pattern of generational abuse, after escaping from the shadow of his terrifying father, the legacy of violence lives on within him, with his childhood terror haunting his adulthood, a horror that he passes on to his own son, echoing specific details decades later, breaking Danny’s arm in a drunken haze and later, pushed by the Overlook to murder his son. In his final moments within the Overlook, Jack becomes a ghost of sorts himself, possessed by the place’s evil, which taps into Jack’s capacity for violence to goad him into killing his wife and son. However, Poger argues that “The hotel manipulates Jack with his cooperation, but it cannot remove his essential characteristics of love and humanity” (50). Standing up to this monstrous version of his father, Danny says “You’re not my daddy . . . And if there’s a little bit of my daddy left inside you, he knows they lie here . . . You’re it, not my daddy. You’re the hotel” (Shining 631, emphasis original). To save his family from the Overlook, Jack has to fight back against both the hotel’s ghosts and his own demons. Fighting off the Overlook’s malicious control, Jack regains himself—his own best, un-haunted self—for one fleeting moment, telling Danny to “Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you” (Shining 632). In the end, though Jack is incapable THE GHOST 65 of shedding the ghosts which cling to him, from both the Overlook and his own flawed past, he is able to rise above them, to hold them at bay long enough for Wendy, Danny, and Hallorann to escape, scarred but not destroyed. The events of that childhood winter at the Overlook Hotel haunt Danny Torrance as he grows up and these unshakeable horrors are at the center of King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep. Samantha Figliola argues that “Danny is the most haunting (and haunted) of a host of children who have populated King’s novels and stories” (54) and in Doctor Sleep, readers get to see how those ghosts have shaped Danny’s life and transformed him, influencing the man he has become. Just as with the ghosts ofThe Shining, some of them are external manifestations—both Room 217’s Mrs. Massey and Horace Derwent find Danny again—while others are internal and inescapable, such as Jack Torrance’s familial legacy of alcoholism and rage, both of which plague adult Dan. As Brian Truitt writes in his review of the novel, with Doctor Sleep, “Decades have passed, and now Dan Tor- rance is struggling with a variety of demons—the literal ones as well as the ones that come at the bottom of a bottle or a baggie of white powder.” After hitting rock bottom, Dan shakes off at least some of these ghosts, finds a purpose and a family of which to be a part, and becomes a Hallorann-esque mentor to young Abra Stone, a girl with a shining even more powerful than Dan’s own. While Dan kicks the booze and drugs, he cannot escape himself and the myriad ways in which he is like his father, as well as his memories of and complicated feelings about his father, and the experience of his childhood weeks at the Overlook, which draws him back for a final confrontation. As Abra perceptively observes, “the past is gone, even though it defines the present” (Doctor Sleep 485). However, in the end, the past is neither entirely gone nor forgotten, but rather an integral part of who Dan is, the challenges he faces, and the path his future will take.

Bag of Bones

In Bag of Bones, Mike Noonan is a successful suspense author whose wife Jo dies unexpectedly, felled by an aneurysm in a hot drugstore parking lot. In the aftermath of this loss, Mike struggles with the discovery that Jo was pregnant, with his resultant doubts about her honesty and fidelity compounding his grief. Mike retreats to Sara Laughs, their house on Dark Score Lake, Maine, which he quickly discovers is already occupied by a rabble of ghosts. The haunting also radiates out from Sara Laughs, inextricably tied to the life of the community, the unincorporated TR-90. As Mike soon discovers, the TR has been cursed by the vengeful spirit of Sara Tidwell, a black singer who was gang-raped and murdered by several of the 66 TEACHING STEPHEN KING town’s young men, who also murdered her child. Mike’s return, grief, and preoccupation with the haunting of Sara Laughs are further complicated by his attraction to a lovely young widow, Mattie Devore, and her daughter Kyra, who are locked in an ugly custody dispute with the woman’s wealthy father-in-law, Max Devore, who is incidentally the descendent of the ring- leader in Sara Tidwell’s rape and murder. At the novel’s publication, the book was well-reviewed and several critics speculated that it was the start of a new direction for King’s writing, a more sophisticated, subtler nod to the traditional Gothic style rather than the gore-splattered horror which those passingly familiar with King often per- ceive as his trademark. As GQ reviewer Terrence Rafferty commented of the novel, “it practically brings the whole [ghost story] genre back to life” (170). Entertainment Weekly’s Tom De Haven also marked this novel as a departure from King’s signature style in his review, arguing that “for all of its potboiler conventions (isolated house, mysterious rappings, damsel in distress), Bag of Bones is, hands down, King’s most narratively subversive fiction. Whenever you’re positive—just positive!—you know where this ghost story is heading, that’s exactly when it gallops off in some jaw-dropping new direction” (“King of the Weird” 95). Bag of Bones is a complex ghost story, moving well beyond the simplistic trope of a single haunting spirit to explore the significance of place, violence, and the continuing influence of the past on the present, as well as complicating these familiar ghost story elements with issues of race and sexuality. The causal links of the haunting are initially unclear and the blurry lines between past and present are complex and convoluted, while the presence of several ghosts attempting to communicate with Mike often keep him, as well as the reader, guessing about the spirits’ motivation and honesty. The truth of Sara Tidwell’s violent end is only revealed in bits and pieces, coming together slowly over a few hundred pages. As Mike works through the mystery, the answers only become clear as one individual piece after another falls into place: for example, first he finds out about the death of two of Sara and the Red-Tops’ children: one child was caught in a mali- ciously laid animal trap (Bag of Bones 370), while Sara’s child was drowned by his mother’s attackers (Bag of Bones 398–399). Weeks later, he comes to the realization that a disproportionate number of local residents and their children have names beginning with “K” (Bag of Bones 565, 567), a supernatural echo of Sara’s murdered son, Kito. Finally, upon discovering the truth of Sara Tidwell’s rape, murder, and subsequent curse, Mike realizes via an out of body experience that takes him back in time to Sara’s murder, that her influence affects the entire town, not just in this naming, but in compelling the descendants of her murderers to kill their own children until their family lines are extinguished (Bag of Bones 669–689). THE GHOST 67

This realization takes him weeks to achieve, punctuated with a number of red herrings, loose ends, and unanswered questions along the way, leaving Mike with the feeling that there is more going on in the TR than meets the eye, something dark and dangerous just below the surface of the life of this small community. Mike Noonan is especially unique in terms of his characterization because he is one of King’s relatively rare first-person narrators, allowing readers direct and intimate knowledge of his thoughts and feelings, as well as keeping them wondering about his narrative reliability. For example, is his house truly haunted or is he simply going crazy, a possibility that he himself contemplates several times over the course of the novel? This characterization is especially significant when it comes to parsing out Mike’s motivations and ultimate reliability as a narrator. Mike repeatedly finds himself influenced by the curse of Sara Tidwell, trapped within what he repeatedly thinks of as “the zone” of the TR, internalizing the haunting and finding himself steered by it—specifically by Sara Tidwell’s desire for vengeance—and at times unaware of the ways in which his actions are not his own. This is especially powerful in the wake of Mattie’s murder, when Mike finds himself pushed to kill Kyra. Under the thrall of “the zone,” he even convinces himself that this murder is in Kyra’s best interest, a way of setting her free from the pain and suffering she faces: “let it all end—the sorrow, the hurt, the fear . . . Life was a sickness. I was going to give her a nice warm bath and cure her of it” (Bag of Bones 633). This is a pivotal moment in the novel where the unreliability of Mike’s first-person narrative position is especially clear. As Rebecca Janicker explains of this section of the novel in her article “‘It’s My House, Isn’t It?’: Memory, Haunting, and Liminality in Stephen King’s Bag of Bones,” Mike’s “dipping in and out of the zone compromises the reliability of his narration, as when he believes taking Kyra to Sara Laughs will protect her. A typically gothic device, this serves to show the extent to which Sara’s ghostly interventions have infil- trated his mind and begun to directly influence his behaviour” (191). In these moments, Mike is not quite himself, instead animated by the haunting, driven by Sara Tidwell’s desire for revenge, which has radiated through the long years since her murder. In addition to Sara Tidwell’s ghostly presence and malicious influence, the spirit of Mike’s wife Jo also haunts their house on Dark Score Lake. In spite of Mike’s struggles with the sexually charged aftermath of his wife’s death, his discovery of her pregnancy, and his doubts about her fidelity, Jo is a largely comforting presence there, reassuring Mike of her love and faithfulness. Jo is the counteracting force to Sara’s rage, leading Mike to discover the truth while Sara attempts to divert him and turn him to her own murderous ends. Jo calls Mike back from brink of madness, as he 68 TEACHING STEPHEN KING contemplates murdering Kyra, her voice crying together with Mattie’s to bring him out of “the zone” and back to himself (Bag of Bones 632). Jo communicates with Mike through his writing, sending him encoded messages to lead him to the plastic owls hidden under her studio, the treasure trove of her own research into the history of the TR and Sara Laughs, and the dark discoveries to which it led her. When Mike must face Sara Tidwell and destroy her bones to end her curse, Jo comes back to him, if only for a few moments, taking up arms against Sara and keeping her at bay while Mike completes the final exorcism, pouring lye over the bones of Sara and her son, Kito. As Sara’s screams fade away, Mike turns to his similarly dis- solving wife: “It was Jo I wanted to see, Jo who had come God knew how far and suffered God knew how much to help me” Bag( of Bones 691). Mike’s life and house have been haunted by a variety of ghosts, working at cross- purposes, waging a war for both his soul and his sanity, but in the end, the power of love and strength of his connection with Jo temporarily transcend the limitations of death, turning him toward salvation rather than destruction, an optimism that is later echoed by Mattie’s brief, ghostly return to save Kyra (Bag of Bones 706–708). Bag of Bones also effectively highlights the connection between the past and the present, including issues of race, sexual violence, and murder. As Janicker explains, Sara Laughs and the TR “act as a liminal space; caught between past and present, the living and the dead, they provide a transitional area in which traumatic memories are continually thrust back upon the community responsible until they are finally relieved” (184). Inherent in this memory function is the need for responsibility and expiation and, as Janicker continues, “there is a clear sense of the collective: collective aggres- sion, collective guilt and collective punishment not only shared by a whole community but passed down to their descendants” (ibid.). Mike travels between the past and the present, passing back and forth between the two time periods, and in doing so realizes the immediacy connecting the two, including the ways in which the sins of the past continue to haunt the present. Until Sara Tidwell is properly laid to rest, the past is never truly passed and it will keep repeating itself over and over again. Another common uniting characteristic between the past and the present of the TR are the gender politics that impact—and eventually destroy— the lives of Sara Tidwell and Mattie Devore. The figure of the “damsel in distress” is a common archetype of the Gothic and both Sara and Mattie can be considered within this framework. As Réka Tóth explains in “The Plight of the Gothic Heroine: Female Development and Relationships in Eighteenth Century Female Gothic Fiction,” the genre often “necessitates the presence of a female protagonist who stands in the midst of abuses and dangers posed by . . . [cultural] institutions” such as “family, marriage, THE GHOST 69

[and] church” (21). Despite Sara and Mattie’s individual strengths, they find themselves circumscribed and persecuted by these systems: the patriarchal status quo, as embodied by Devore and his friends, refutes Sara’s sense of belonging in the TR through the violence of the racist and viciously patriarchal men who attack her, while Mattie finds herself powerless before Max Devore’s overwhelming financial influence, through which he buys the favor of the courts and many citizens of the TR. Both women refuse to surrender, despite the implacable institutional forces stacked against them, though in the end, this resistance is ineffectual and both women end up murdered as a result. As Tóth argues, within this Gothic tradition, “the female has to be sexualised or murdered—in short eradicated, disposed of, suppressed—so that men could define themselves in a patriarchal world where identity is linked to possession” (32). With these women’s murders, the patriarchal order is restored, both individually and culturally. As with many traditional Gothic tales, the idea of property and owner- ship is at the root of each woman’s consideration as aberrant and unwel- come. Sara is black and Mattie is poor, both of which position them outside the realm of acceptable citizenship and, seen as thus vulnerable, what little they do have can be taken from them, by violent means and with little fear of larger social repercussion. In their resistance they threaten the status quo, which leads to the impulse for the traditionally Gothic villain to “[assume] male ‘title’ over female property . . . the penetration of which more often than not results in the growth of male desire to penetrate the female body, as well” (Tóth 31–32). With Sara, this penetration is literal in her gang rape by Jared Devore and his friends, while with Mattie it is more metaphorical, with Max Devore obsessed with taking custody of Kyra, perverting and devaluing her shared love with his now-dead son Lance, subverting the natural patriarchal lineage and subsuming it under his own desire for ultimate control. Sara’s role as a Gothic heroine and the violence she suffers is further complicated by race. She and the Red-Tops are black in an otherwise predominantly white community in the early twentieth century: they are tour- ing entertainers, travelers passing through, and seen as an exotic diversion. Browsing the historic clippings chronicling the band’s time in the TR, Mike reflects that “The overall tone shook me . . . I’d describe it as unfailing genial contempt. The Red-Tops were ‘our Southern blackbirds’ and ‘our rhythmic darkies.’ They were ‘full of dusky good-nature.’ . . . They were, God keep us and save us, reviews. Good ones, if you didn’t mind being called full of dusky good-nature” (Bag of Bones 651–652). Despite this paternalistic racism, as they stay on longer, Sara and her group begin forming relationships with the people of the TR and it is this affront to the cultural traditions and hierarchy of the community that spark the men’s violence against Sara. 70 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

As Mike passes backward in time to witness Sara’s rape and murder, Jared Devore rages that on the community street “She thought she could walk there like a white gal! She and her big teeth and her big tits and her snotty looks. She thought she was something special, but we taught her different . . . We taught her her place” (Bag of Bones 671).4 But Jared is one of the only people who feels this way, an outsider within a world in which he has always been privileged, held in a position of leadership and authority. Mike counters Jared’s outrage, understanding that the other members of the TR “did talk to her. She had a way about her—that laugh, maybe. Men talked to her about crops and the women showed off their babies. In fact they gave her their babies to hold and when she laughed down at them, they laughed back up at her. The girls asked her advice about boys. They boys . . . they just looked” (Bag of Bones 673, emphasis original). Sara has been accepted into the community, seen as both a friend and a source of erotic fascination. As Teresa Derrickson argues of sexuality and race in the Gothic tradition, “racial blood . . . [colors] its characters in ways that paint clear demarcations between those of moral rectitude and those of moral depravity, those intrinsically civil and those hopelessly rapacious” (48). From this perspective, despite Sara’s acceptance by the rest of the TR—and in the case of the young men, their desire coupled with their appreciation of Sara’s unattainability—to Jared and his gang, this makes her deviant, a sexual object rather than an active agent, and as such, they feel they can and even must reassert their superiority by dominating and denigrating her, debasing her until she is firmly beaten back down in accordance with what they see as her proper racial and sexual station. However, despite this sexualization and perceived deviance, she is not theirs to contain or pos- sess; in fact, when they try, she literally laughs in their faces, both at Jared’s impotence and because, despite their sexual violence against her, they can never own her, can never defeat her unbridled spirit. It is this final resistance, especially to Jared’s inadequate masculinity, that is the final straw. In raping her, Jared reclaims his physical masculinity and in murdering her, his patriarchal position within the culture is reaffirmed, putting all back as it should be, from Jared’s violently misogynistic perspective. In both The Shiningand Bag of Bones, the hauntings experienced by these characters are both internal and external, a combination of their own individual memories, questions, and failings coupled with the ghostly presence of the past asserting itself on the present. Whether these ghosts are malicious, like the spirits of the Overlook and Sara Tidwell, or drawn back by love, like Jo and Mattie, King’s work suggests that the line between the present and the past, the living and the dead, is thin, permeable, and often closer than we think. Section II

Real Life Horror 6

Rage

ing is best known for his tales of supernatural horror, such as the Kvampires, werewolves, monsters, and ghosts of the previous section. However, some of King’s most effective terror stems not from these fictional manifestations of terror, but from much closer to home, based in the context of real life horrors, including school shootings, sexual violence, and the often difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. While the vast majority of King’s published work is readily available, in both trade paperback and ebook versions, in the late 1990s King made the choice to pull one of his novellas from publication: Rage, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Driving King’s choice was the disturbing fact that copies of the novella had been found in connection to a couple of fatal school shootings, a presumed influence on shooters who identified with King’s anti-hero protagonist, Charlie Decker. King published his novella Rage in 1977 as Bachman (a name he also used to publish other works, including The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man, Thinner, The Regulators, and Blaze). Told from the first-person perspective of Char- lie Decker, the novella tells Decker’s story as he becomes a school shooter and takes his high school algebra class hostage. While Rage is no longer being published, used copies of the original 1985 collection of The Bach- man Books are often readily available from online sellers1 and many libraries still carry this collection, which includes Rage. In the opening pages of Rage, Charlie discloses himself as an unreliable narrator, reflecting that “Two years ago. To the best of my recollection, that was about the time I started to lose my mind” (Rage 7). As he begins telling his story, Charlie has already been suspended for attacking his chem- istry teacher, Mr. Carlson, with a pipe wrench. He is temporarily back in school, though in the early chapters, he is called to the principal’s office to be informed of his expulsion and transfer to Greenmantle Academy, a boys’ reform school. After receiving this news, Charlie sets fire to his locker, 74 TEACHING STEPHEN KING takes his father’s gun, and returns to his algebra classroom, where he shoots his teacher, Mrs. Underwood. Charlie then takes his class hostage, shooting another teacher who comes to the room to see what is going on. However, once the initial shock of the situation wears off, Charlie’s fellow students largely rally behind him and they proceed to, in Charlie’s words, “[get] it on” (Rage 33), sharing their darkest secrets and deepest fears with one another as they question and challenge the world outside. As with many of King’s other works, particularly his coming of age stories, the adolescents in Rage find themselves abused by and resentful of the adults around them and the arbitrary power their elders wield. Both Mr. Carlson and Mrs. Underwood antagonize their students when they provide wrong answers or falter in their attempts to articulate the right ones. On the day Charlie attacked Mr. Carlson, the teacher had called him up to the blackboard to complete a problem in front of the class and as Charlie struggled to solve the problem, Mr. Carlson “started to make fun of me. He was asking me if I remembered what two and two made, if I’d ever heard of long division, a wonderful invention, he said, ha-ha, a regular Henny Youngman” (Rage 149). Mrs. Underwood has a similarly antago- nistic approach and on the morning of Charlie’s expulsion, when one of his fellow students is attempting to frame his response to the algebraic equation of “a = 16.” Billy Sawyer responds that “a” could be understood as “Eight plus eight” (Rage 8) and when Underwood asks him to elaborate further, he fumbles “See, if you add eight and eight, it means . . .” (ibid.). Even when Charlie himself is not the center of attention in this educational haranguing, it makes him painfully uncomfortable: “‘Shall I lend you my thesaurus?’ Mrs. Underwood asked, smiling alertly. My stomach began to hurtle a little and my breakfast started to move around a little . . . Mrs. Underwood’s smile reminded me of the shark in Jaws” (ibid.). Out- side of the classroom, adults are not much more helpful or nurturing. As Tony Magistrale explains of Charlie’s situation in Stephen King: The Second Decade: Danse Macabre to The Dark Half,

Charlie knows about rules and authority, but he knows almost nothing of love and affection; he has been taught the necessity of self-control and repression, but not how to channel his tremendous energies into constructive release; and while school and his parents labor to inculcate in him civilized virtues through lectures and books, the alacrity with which they employ violence undermines the sincerity of their efforts. (52)

Principal Denver struggles to understand Charlie but fails and though the guidance counselor, Don Grace, has been meeting with Charlie on a daily basis since Charlie’s attack of Mr. Carlson, Grace is no closer to understanding who Charlie is or why he does what he does. Captain Philbrick RAGE 75 of the State Police is called in to talk to Charlie through the loudspeaker as he holds his classmates hostage, and Philbrick is similarly powerless to understand or effectively respond to him. Things are just as bad at home, where Charlie’s mother coddles him and his relationship with his father is characterized by violence and fear. As Charlie tells his classmates, “My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember” (Rage 53). Charlie shares traumatic stories from his past, including accounts of his distant and abusive relationship with his father and his troubled interactions with women. Let into Charlie’s own dark universe and finding themselves under a shared pressure from the adults and world outside, Charlie’s hostages begin to share their own stories of pain, anger, and suffering, as it quickly becomes apparent that in many ways, Charlie’s fellow students are just like him. Within this unique situation, Jesse W. Nash argues, “the adolescent is given a privileged place from which to speak, and to speak unchallenged” (154). Inside the classroom, the students communally dis- mantle the structure of the wider world, obliterating the lines that separate one clique from another and shouting truths that are supposed to remain unspoken. As Magistrale argues, “The students appear to recognize and accept Charlie as one of their own; perhaps none of them would resort to his extreme form of antisocial behavior, but they all understand the spirit that has created the hostage situation” (The Second Decade 53). “Pig Pen” Dano tells the class that the reason for his slovenly appearance is that his mother spends all of their money entering contests, refusing to buy him new clothes (Rage 90). Good Girl Sandra Cross talks about how she went looking for anonymous sex with a dangerous stranger: “I didn’t know him at all. I kept thinking that maybe he was one of those sex maniacs. That he might have a knife. That he might make me take dope. Or that I might get pregnant. I felt alive” (Rage 127, emphasis original). Listening to their stories, seeing the ways in which his fellow students respond to his violence, it is their savagery that haunts Charlie, rather than his own, as he asks: “them. How do we understand them?” (Rage 31, emphasis original). Charlie has admitted and even, to some extent, come to terms with his own madness, but when he sees it reflected in the vast majority of his fellow students, his understanding of the world is unbearably altered. The only holdout is Ted Jones, the classroom’s “golden boy,” who staunchly defends the status quo throughout their ordeal; within the classroom, “Ted is a trenchant reminder to all of them of the hypocrisy and cruelty that is at the center of the patriarchal system Charlie and King attack” (Magistrale, The Second Decade 53). While the others give themselves over to the experience, baring their souls and disclosing their secrets, Ted refuses, instead sitting back in silence and in judgment, with a predatory gaze fixed on Charlie, ready to take him down at the first sign of weakness. 76 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

In the all too familiar story of a high school shooting, Ted is the expected hero, the guy who will fight the monster and save the day. Ted is “symbolic of the adult world that all of these children have grown to hate, even though they are in the process of joining it” (ibid.). Despite this seemingly unassailable façade, Ted has plenty of his own secrets and his own shame, though he refuses to share them with the class. In the end, his fellow students turn against him, falling upon them as they hit, taunt, and spit on him, rubbing ink in his hair as a final act of debasement, a visual marker of Ted as an outsider, an Other, expelled from the safety of the communal group. After they leave the room, Ted and Charlie are both sent to psychiatric facilities, Ted rendered catatonic by his traumatic experience and Charlie found psychologically unfit to stand trial. In the novella’s final chapter, alone in his room, Charlie is still haunted by his fellow students, unable to open the yearbook that his mother has sent him, sure that he will be able to “Just as soon as I can make myself believe that there won’t be any black streaks on their hands. That their hands will be clean. With no ink. Maybe next week I’ll be completely sure of that” (Rage 170). Charlie has come to a new understanding in his time as a school shooter and hostage-taker, but it is one that has left him even more psychologically unsettled and damaged than he was at the outset and the novella’s conclusion, with its epistolary inclusion of court and medical records that transcribe but shed no light, is anticlimactic, raising questions rather than providing answers. Rage provides a wealth of opportunities for discussing troubling contemporary issues, including school shootings in general as well as more focused discussions of possible causes of and responses to this violence, and finally, King’s choice to pull Rage from publication.

School Shootings and Rage

School shootings have become an all too common occurrence in contemporary American culture: Moses Lake, Washington in 1996. West Paducah, Kentucky in 1997. Columbine High School in 1999. Virginia Tech in 2007. Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. Marys- ville, Washington in 2014. In each of these instances, one or more troubled adolescents or young adults brought guns to a school and turned them on the students there, with devastating results. According to an article by Niraj Chokshi, there were 74 school shooting incidents in the two years following the violence at Sandy Hook Elementary School.2 School shootings have become a disturbingly common occurrence in American culture. In 2002, the Secret Service, working with the Department of Educa- tion, looked at 37 school shooting incidents involving 41 shooters between RAGE 77

1974 and 2000 to see if there were any significant recognizable patterns among shooters. After their research, they released a report called the “Safe School Initiative.” What they found was that school shooting incidents were “rarely impulsive acts” but instead were “typically thought out and planned out in advance” (“Secret Service Safe School Initiative”). Dave Cullen’s research for his book Columbine corroborates this trend, as he reports that “a staggering 93 percent planned their attack in advance” (Cullen 322). In interviews following the shootings, The Secret Service Safe School Initiative report also found that in most cases, at least one adult had been worried about the shooter and that the shooter’s fellow students often had suspicions or knew of the shooter’s intentions, though they didn’t tell adults. The Secret Service Safe School Initiative and several other experts in the psychology of violence concur that there is no distinct profile for school shooters. These shooters do, however, tend to share some common attributes, including “narcissism, depression, low self esteem and a fascination with violence” (“Expert: No Profile”). In addition, as Cullen points out in his discussion of the Secret Service and FBI guides, “All the recent school shooters shared exactly one trait: 100 percent male. (Since the study a few have been female). Aside from personal experience, no other characteristic hit 50 percent, not even close . . . Attackers come from all ethnic, economic, and social classes. The bulk came from solid two-parent homes. Most had no criminal record or history of violence” (322). There are a wide range of catalysts that have been hypothesized as contributing to school shootings, including American culture’s obsession with and glamorization of violence, which is often reflected in popular culture; for example, the music of Marilyn Manson and the computer game Doom were debated as possible contributing factors to the Columbine shootings. As with other types of popular culture featuring violence, King’s Rage was brought into the school shooting conversation in some troubling ways, including several connections between the novella and real-life shooters. In 1988, Jeff Cox held his English class hostage in San Gabriel, California. Cox said he got the idea, in part, from Rage (Guns, ch. 2). In 1989 in Jack- son, Kentucky, Dustin Pierce held his World History class hostage; as hostage negotiator Bob Stephens later said, Pierce was reading and may have been inspired by Rage (Guns, ch. 2). In 1993, Scott Pennington shot his English teacher, Deanna McDavid, and a school custodian, Marvin Hicks, taking his class hostage, then letting them go a few at a time. Reflecting on Pennington’s troubled relationship with his father and his peers, U.S. News and World Report’s Jerry Buckley writes that “there were times when Pen- nington must have felt as if he knew Decker. Maybe even a time . . . when he felt he was just like Decker.” Barry Loukaitis, a shooter at Frontier Mid- dle School in Moses Lake, Washington in 1996 asked his fellow classmates, 78 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

“this beats the hell out of algebra, doesn’t it?” as he held them hostage, a line that echoes Charlie’s in Rage (Johnson). Following a school shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky in 1997, a copy of King’s novella was found in the locker of school shooter Michael Carneal (“Bogeyboys”). Though the influence of Rage is clearly present in these instances, the nature of that influence is significantly harder to articulate. King addressed this issue in his keynote speech, “The Bogeyboys,” which he delivered at the Vermont Library Conference in 1999.3 Con- sidering the issue of school shootings, King opens his speech with the reflection that in the case of school shootings or other rampage-type violence taking the lives of children and young adults, “When kids die on the highway, it’s sad but not nationwide news. When the bogeyman strikes, however . . . that’s different” (“Bogeyboys”). King goes on in his speech to explore several contributing factors to adolescent violence and school shootings, including “the amp-cult atmosphere of make-believe violence” (ibid.). However, King argues that popular culture is a relatively small part of these influences and it is these adolescents’ everyday lives, at home and at school, that need to be most intensely scrutinized and explored, saying that:

Bogeyboys do not win foot-races, get kissed by the Homecoming Queen, or garner blue ribbons. They are profoundly inarticulate and don’t date much . . . At home, they stay in their rooms. If pressed, the parents of bogeyboys will often admit that they were afraid of these children long before they broke out and committed their acts of violence. If they add that they can’t say exactly why they were afraid, no one need be surprised; these parents, often bright, nonabusive, and community-active, are rarely skilled at communication within the family . . . Bogeyboys make few friends, and those they do make are often as crazy and balefully confused as they are. (“Bogeyboys”)

As King’s multi-faceted exploration of this issue in his speech shows—an argument he would develop further in his ebook Guns more than a decade later in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings—there is no one single answer, no silver bullet that will prevent all future school shootings. Instead, there is a complex combination of causes, ranging from individual to relational and further afield to social and cultural. In order to understand and effectively respond to adolescent violence and school shootings, it is necessary to take this wide range of factors, as well as their dynamic and often volatile combinations, into account. On his decision to pull Rage from publication, King said while there’s no definitive proof “that Michael Carneal, the boy from Kentucky who shot three of his classmates dead as they prayed before school, had read my novel, Rage, but news stories following the incident reported that a copy of RAGE 79 it had been found in his locker. It seems likely to me that he did” (“Bogey- boys”). Even without a verified direct causal relationship, King continued, “I asked my publishers to take the damned thing out of print. They con- curred” (“Bogeyboys”). King also commented on Rage being pulled from publication in the introduction to Blaze, the most recently published (and likely final) Bachman book, saying that Rage is “now out of print, and a good thing” (“Full Disclosure” 1). Finally, King addressed this issue in 2013 in his Kindle Single ebook, Guns, which looked at the epidemic of gun violence, school shootings, and our cultural responses in the wake of Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Here King says that “My book did not break Cox, Pierce, Carneal, or Loukaitis, or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken. Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale” (Guns, ch. 2). As he asks of these shooters, “Is it really so surprising that they would find a soul brother in the fictional Charlie Decker? But that doesn’t mean we excuse them, or give them blueprints to express their hate and fear. Charlie had to go” (ibid.). King had every right, protected by the freedom of speech ensured by the First Amendment, to ignore these connections, to disavow any relationship between his book and this violence, and to continue publishing Rage. However, troubled by these correlations, King did what the law could not demand that he do and chose to self-censor. King’s choice raises several thought-provoking questions for discussion, including the weighting of freedom of expression versus the greater good, the distinction between connection and culpability, and whether readers agree with King’s proactive choice to pull Rage from publication or if that choice is ultimately effective in keeping the book— still available used, in libraries, and in bootleg PDF format online—from finding its way into the hands of those it could destructively influence. The relationship—if any—between popular culture and acts of violence remains fiercely debated. Does watching violent movies or television shows desensitize viewers to violence? Do song lyrics romanticizing gun violence make the listener any more likely to go out and shoot someone than if they hadn’t listened to that song? Or does reading King’s Rage mean that a student may then become a shooter, seeing this type of violence as an acceptable form of expression? While there are arguments made for a direct cause and effect relationship—some of which King draws into conversation in “The Bogeyboys”—in the case of school shootings, the choice is ultimately that of the shooter. Presumably with free will and at least some level of control over his own actions (insanity defense notwithstanding), these are acts the school shooters premeditate, plan, and choose to carry out. While we cannot boil down the debate to a simple axiom like “popular culture made me do it,” King acknowledges that there are some gray areas. As he reflects, “a novel 80 TEACHING STEPHEN KING such as Rage may act as an accelerant on a troubled mind” (“Bogeyboys”), a potentially dangerous influence, if short of a direct causal link. When it comes to the interrelationship between school shootings and popular culture, it is rarely a clear, black-and-white issue. What we have instead is a large, ever-changing, and situationally shifting gray area.

Causes of School Shootings

Reading and critical discussion of Rage also creates the opportunity to discuss a wide range of possible contributing factors and responses to these instances of violence, including gun control, security in schools, mental health concerns, potential relationships between popular culture and violence, and contemporary crises of masculinity. In his Kindle single Guns, King discusses three key issues of gun control, ranking these from the most to least likely to be enacted: comprehensive background checks including a mandatory waiting periods, a ban on clips that hold more than ten rounds, and a ban on so-called “assault rifles such as the Bushmaster and the AR-15” (Guns, ch. 6). However, while these gun control measures could do some good in addressing violence, in other ways this is a very limited measure since “the guns are already out there and the great majority of them are being bought, sold, and carried illegally” (Guns, ch. 3). Any gun control measure aimed at the regulation of the sale and possession of firearms is, by definition, limited to those who acquire these weapons through legal means. The Columbine shooters, Harris and Kle- bold, were under 18, too young to legally buy guns themselves, though they were able to convince a friend to go to a gun show with them and act as the buyer (Cullen 90). The guns Adam Lanza took with him to Sandy Hook Elementary School were from his home, legally purchased by his mother, part of a larger contemporary trend in which “School shootings in the USA during the two years since the Newtown, Conn., massacre often involved a minor taking a gun from home and using it in a confrontation that started out as an argument” (Copeland). King’s own Charlie Decker faced no legal hurdles getting the gun he took to school, simply removing the unsecured and forgotten pistol from his father’s desk drawer (Rage 27). As a result, any increased gun control measure, no matter how effectively implemented and enforced, will likely fall short of the aim of keeping weapons out of the hands of potentially dangerous would-be school shooters. Another possible response to violence in schools is having heightened security, such as armed guards, or allowing teachers to carry guns. In a press conference a few days after the Newtown, Connecticut shootings, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association argued that “five years ago, RAGE 81 after the Virginia Tech tragedy, when I said we should put armed security in every school, the media called me crazy. But what if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he had been confronted by qualified, armed security?” (qtd. in “NRA Speech”). In the aftermath of the Newtown tragedy, several states have taken this possibility under consideration, with South Dakota passing a law in 2013 that allows employees to carry guns on school property. South Dakota Representative Scott Craig argued that especially for isolated, rural schools, which may be far from police intervention, “the knowledge that an armed volunteer is in a school could dissuade a would-be attacker” (Prall). There was an armed guard on site at Colorado’s Arapahoe High School during a school shooting situation late in 2013, which proved effective in limiting the damage the shooter was able to inflict. Following the incident, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robison concluded that the guard’s presence “was absolutely critical to the fact that we didn’t have more deaths and injuries” (qtd. in Knickerbocker). As Brad Knickerbocker writes, “The whole episode—from the time the shooter entered the school until he shot himself—lasted just one minute and 20 seconds” (Knickerbocker), arguably brought to such a swift conclusion by the presence and response of the armed guard who confronted the shooter. Such security could potentially provide a front line against individuals attempting to enter schools to commit violence, though this presumes proper training, skill, and appropriate response from any employees carrying firearms or, in the case of armed guards, budgetary approval. Mental illness is another key concern when it comes to gun violence in schools. Alan Richarz of The Christian Science Monitor argues that “Any real solution attempting to prevent future mass shootings must focus less on the gun, and more on what factors drive people to pick up that gun and engage in indiscriminate killing. In particular, preventing future mass shootings requires a frank look at underlying, and often unaddressed, mental illness and social isolation in America.” Many school shooters have been identified—either previously diagnosed or in the aftermath of the violence—as suffering from mental illness. For example, Dr. Dwayne Fuselier posthumously diagnosed Columbine shooter Eric Harris with psychopathy. As Cullen explains, “In popular usage, any crazy killer is called a psychopath, but in psychiatry, the term denotes a specific mental condition” (187), with common personality traits including being “charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy” (239). A Yale Univer- sity report on Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, concluded that Lanza was “‘completely untreated in the years before the shooting’ for psychiatric and physical ailments like anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and 82 TEACHING STEPHEN KING was also deprived of recommended services and drugs” (Cowan). If these mental illnesses had been identified and properly responded to, perhaps violence could have been averted in these two instances. However, focusing on mental health could also potentially heighten the stigma already too often associated with mental illness, which can keep individuals from reaching out and seeking the help they need. This is a particularly significant concern, given the lack of strong connection between mental illness and violence against others. As Jessica Rosenberg explains in her article “Mass Shootings and Mental Health Policy” in The Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, “a large body of research shows that violence by people with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, is rare and accounts for approximately only 4–5% of violent acts” (109). Positing a cause and effect relationship between mental illness and school shootings may help identify and address potential shooters; however, it could also further target and marginalize an already stigmatized group while, given the statistics on the low level of interconnection between mental illness and violence, have little overall impact on preventing school shootings and other types of large-scale violence. Another concern that relates directly to King’s choice to pull Rage from publication is the potential and oft-argued relationship between popular culture and violence, a connection that has been debated as far back as the 1920s (International Communication Association). In Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Vio- lence, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano argue that when it comes to school shootings and other rampage-style violence, “the root cause is the steady diet of violent entertainment our kids see on TV, in movies, and in the video games they play—as they sit in front of their screens and digital devices for forty hours each week. This amount of continuous exposure to gratuitous violent images sensationalizing murder, rape, and torture is neither benign nor cathartic” (2–3). Instead, Gross- man and DeGaetano argue, this constant exposure to violent imagery in popular culture “primes children to see killing as acceptable” (3). Discuss- ing connections between pop culture violence—specifically video games— and real world violence, David Bauder explains that “Violence in video games seems more and more realistic all the time, notes Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University . . . Bushman conducted a study that he said showed that a person who played violent video games three days in a row showed more aggressive and hostile behavior than people who weren’t playing” (Bauder). However, much as King identifies Rage as a possible “accelerant” rather than a cause in school shootings, an interest in violent popular culture is likely more productively addressed as a symptom than a direct cause of real-world violence. Writing RAGE 83 about Adam Lanza, Slate’s Geeta Dayal argues that “Lanza’s interactions with popular culture—the video games he played, the movies he watched, the music he listened to—may have been symptoms of his alienation, but they were not the root cause of his violent behavior.” This echoes King’s reflections on the role of Rage in inspiring or influencing school shooters: violent popular culture may hold an appeal for those who are already suffering, who already consider violence as a possible reflection of their experiences or answer to their problems, though rarely a singular, motivating cause of violence itself. Finally, since school shooters have almost exclusively been young men, some researchers have been exploring contemporary crises of masculinity and asking what makes young men more prone to solving problems with violence than their female counterparts. Wendi Gilbert, director Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and MissRepresentation.org created the 2015 documentary filmThe Mask You Live In, which is discussed in the article “The Newtown Shooting and Why We Must Redefine Masculinity.” As Gilbert explains, the documentary “explore[s] what it means to be a man in our society and the extremes of masculinity imposed on our boys and men. It further uncovers how American culture reinforces a rigid code of conduct on boys that inhibits their capacity for empathy, stifles their emotional intelligence, limits their definition of success, and in some cases, leads to extreme acts of violence.” As prominent masculinity scholar Douglas Kellner explains, in our contemporary culture, there is “a domi- nant societal connection between masculinity and being a tough guy . . . a mask or façade of violent assertiveness, covering over vulnerabilities” (qtd. in “A Conversation”). However, this culturally prescribed and continually reinforced performance of masculinity is untenable and can have destructive repercussions, as Kellner continues, when “The crisis erupts in outbreaks of violence and societal murder, as men act out rage, which takes extremely violent forms such as political assassinations, serial and mass murders, and school and workplace shootings” (ibid.). When boys and young men are conditioned to believe that their masculinity hinges on their ability to suppress and hide their emotions rather than their willingness to openly address these issues, this repression can lead to destructive behavior, both internally- and externally-directed, pointing toward a clear need to reconsider and reinvent what it means to “be a man” in our contemporary culture. Turning from potential causes to responses to this violence, it’s also necessary to consider the cultural conversation surrounding school shootings. A little more than a month after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, King published Guns as a Kindle Single ebook. As the publisher summarizes Guns, “In a pulls-no-punches essay intended to 84 TEACHING STEPHEN KING provoke rational discussion, Stephen King sets down his thoughts about gun violence in America” (“Guns”). Guns is a thoughtful and complex reflection on gun violence that addresses a variety of factors ranging from gun control and mental health to representations of violence in popular culture, and given the unique potential created by electronic release, King was able to publish Guns quickly, allowing it to become part of the conversation in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings, which is a key strength of e-publication.4 In Guns, King lays out the disturbing familiarity of the media coverage and discussion surrounding school shootings, highlighting the ways in which we have the sense that we already “know” this story, how it will play out, the things that will be said—including the expert interviews and heated debates between gun control advocates and the National Rifle Association, for example—and the things that will be done, which ultimately amounts to not much, as “any bills to change existing gun laws . . . quietly disappear into the legisla- tive swamp” (Guns, ch. 1), all but forgotten until the next tragedy. While the potential causes and responses continue to be fiercely debated, the inarguable truth is that these acts of violence continue to occur with disturbing regularity, often with innocent lives caught in the crossfire.

King’s Choice

Rage has now been out of print for more than fifteen years. Reflecting on the connections between school shootings and Rage, King says that “Once I knew what had happened, I pulled the ejection-seat lever on that particular piece of work. I withdrew Rage, and I did it with relief rather than regret” (“Bogeyboys”). While the complexity of these issues are far too great to draw a direct cause and effect relationship betweenRage and school shootings, King made what he still holds to be the right choice, fulfilling what he sees as a moral obligation. As King writes in Guns, “I didn’t pull Rage from publication because the law demanded it; I was protected under the First Amendment, and the law couldn’t demand it. I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do” (Guns, ch. 6, emphasis original). While he doesn’t regret his decision to pull Rage from publication, he also makes it clear that contrary to media accounts, he doesn’t regret writing it in the first place. While King still believes that pulling Rage from publication was the right choice and he remains happy with his decision to do so, he also says that “Nevertheless, I pulled it with real regret . . . The book told unpleasant truths, and anyone who doesn’t feel a qualm of regret at throwing a blanket over the truth is an asshole with no conscience” (Guns, ch. 2). RAGE 85

High school shooters may have been inspired by Charlie Decker, but there’s one particularly significant distinguishing feature between fiction and reality in these instances: while the students in Rage forge deep relationships with Charlie, transformed by their time in the classroom with him, this camaraderie and coveted anti-hero status is not reflected in any of these emulative examples. As Buckley writes of Scott Pennington’s 1993 shooting and hostage situation, “In the story, Decker, a high school senior, kills two teachers and then holds classmates hostage while trying to convince them he is a hero. In the book, Decker wins approval. In Room 108, Scott Pennington would not. Not ever.” 7

Sexual Violence

ing came under fire—especially early in his career—for the nature Kof his female characters. There is an entire book of literary criticism dedicated to negative representations of women in King’s work, Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women,1 a collection of essays edited by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Teresa Thompson; as Lant and Thompson argue in their introduction, “Although King must be praised for [his] accurate and potent rendition of Everyman in the late twentieth century, his representations of Everywoman often provoke hostility as well as admiration” (4). As Magistrale sums up the criticisms of King’s female characters in his chapter on “Challenging Gender Stereotypes: King’s Evolving Women” in Stephen King: America’s Storyteller, “During the first two decades of his career, several feminist scholars observed that the roles King traditionally allotted women in his fiction and specifically female sexuality itself were patronizingly restrictive and frequently negative” (131), drawing on the critique of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who argued that “it’s disheartening when a writer with so much talent and strength of vision is not able to develop a believable woman character between the ages of seventeen and sixty” (qtd. in Magistrale, “Challenging” 131). King acknowledged this weakness, saying in a 1983 interview that this criticism is “the most justifiable of all those leveled at me” (qtd. in Magistrale, “Challenging” 132). As Magistrale argues, in light of this admission, “King has labored over the years to create more human and less stereotypical female characters. The nineties reflected King’s efforts to redress the first half of a career filled with females who were either ‘barely distinguishable Barbie dolls’ or seductive embodiments of evil” (Magistrale, “Challenging” 132). Many of King’s 1990s novels, such as Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder, reflect his concern with and desire to address this issue. Women’s experiences and violence against women continue to be a central concern of some of King’s contemporary work as well, including his story “The Gingerbread Girl,” which was published in the 2008 collectionJust 88 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

After Sunset and the novellas Big Driver and A Good Marriage, both of which were included in the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars. Sexual abuse and domestic violence have been and remain central concerns of feminism and throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, though while “Feminists [have] worked to end this violence . . . their success was mitigated by the recoil against feminism,” or what Susan Faludi defined as “backlash” (Canfield 392). As Canfield contextualizes Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder, these novels in their frank and unflinching representation of domestic violence added to the hushed awareness that this problem was not going away. King also demonstrated that, contrary to what anti-feminists said, feminism was not to blame, but rather that a society—which ignored such violence—was” (393). However, regardless of these debates over the causes of domestic abuse, while the arguments rage on, so does domestic violence, and in the backlash climate of the 1990s, it was those women who suffered, with significant cuts to programs that supported victims and survivors of domestic abuse. It was within this context that King’s Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, and Rose Madder came out and claimed spots on the New York Times Bestseller List, bringing significant and high-profile pop culture attention to these issues. As Canfield explains, these novels’ “publication dates coincide with increased levels of reported domestic abuse as well as the nation’s growing counterattack against feminism. Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are unique literary contributions during the backlash era because they portrayed domestic violence as a real horror in American life” (393), and their female protagonists as not solely victims, but survivors and heroines in their own right.

Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game

Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game are separate stand-alone novels, taking place hundreds of miles apart, though they also share a distinct narrative overlap, with the lives of Dolores Claiborne and ten-year-old Jessie Mahout fleetingly connecting, as each gets a glimpse of the other in the aftermath of their respective ordeals during the solar eclipse on July 20, 1963. In this momentary flash, these two women who have never met or even heard of one another are brought together in the shared horror of sexual assault, in the aftermath of Dolores’s murder of her husband Joe St. George on Little Tall Island and Jessie’s own experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her father on the shores of Dark Score Lake. In the path of the eclipse, both women find themselves in darkness, each isolated in her own way, but not alone. SEXUAL VIOLENCE 89

The format of Dolores Claiborne is distinctive in that it doesn’t have any chapter breaks, a characteristic shared by a few of King’s other novels, such as Cujo. Instead, it is presented as one continuous, unbroken narrative. As Magistrale explains, “Dolores tells her story via a free association monologue, starting in the middle of what she has to say and working back and forth from past to present . . . [an approach that is designed] to help the reader see that events that occurred in the past are still impacting the present” (“Challenging” 134). Dolores Claiborne is also unique in the larger narrative context of the story. Dolores is not just telling the reader her story, she is in a police interview room, talking to Police Chief Andy Bissette and Officer Frank Proulx of the Little Tall Island, Maine Police force. As the novel opens, Dolores is suspected of the murder of her can- tankerous employer Vera Donovan and while she denies murdering Vera, she confesses to the murder of her husband Joe St. George. There’s also a stenographer there, Nancy Bannister, recording Dolores’s story, another female presence that, while narratively tangential, is often sympathetic and even at times commiserating with Dolores’s experiences and trials and as a woman. Dolores’s tone is informal and conversational, punctuated by her direct addresses to the others in the room. However, Dolores’s remains the sole voice in the novel, with the others an absent presence within the room: the reader knows that they are there because Dolores is speaking to them and they are clearly asking questions to which she is regularly responding. This absent presence is established immediately in the opening line of Dolores Claiborne, when Dolores says “What did you ask, Andy Bissette?” (Dolores Claiborne 19). Even though we never hear Andy’s, Frank’s, or Nancy’s voices, their interactions with Dolores are central to the story and the outcome of those interactions that will decide Dolores’s fate. Dolores’s unique voice, including her conversational Downeast Maine dialect, also powerfully underscores that it is her story readers are hearing, from her point of view, and in her own words. King rarely uses the first-person narrative perspective, though in his use of it here, that narrative perspective also works to develop Dolores’s characterization. As Magistrale argues, “If we view this novel in gendered terms, the novel implies that the strong female voice guiding us through this narrative has earned its right to the language and personality being revealed on the page. In other words, the events of the past have made Dolores Clai- borne into the independent, self-determined character we find narrating this text in present tense” (“Challenging” 134). In contrast to Dolores’s externally focused narrative, Gerald’s Game is almost exclusively internally directed, as Jessie Mahout (now Burlingame) finds herself in a life-threatening predicament, hand-cuffed to the posts of her and her husband Gerald’s bed in their isolated summer house, with 90 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

Gerald dead of a heart attack on the floor nearby and no one to come to her rescue. Jessie’s first priority is to figure out a way to free herself and save her own life, though as she discovers in those long, desperate hours, part of freeing herself also requires her to remember what she has forgotten, to face the long-repressed childhood afternoon on which her father sexually abused her. Jessie has never really escaped that terrifying moment and as she considers that traumatic catalyst, “The total solar eclipse lasted just over a minute that day, Jessie . . . except in your mind. In there, it’s still going on, isn’t it?” (Gerald’s Game 138, emphasis original). As Jessie faces that long- ago nightmare, she discovers her own inner strength through the recogni- tion of all that she has made herself forget, including the shared guilt her father forced upon her and the confusing mixture of love and revulsion that characterized her feelings for him afterward. In Gerald’s Game, Jessie’s most pressing confinement is that of the cuffs that hold her to the bed, where she faces a potential range of horrific deaths from dehydration to blood loss. However, her physical bondage is also a symbol of the ways in which she has psychologically and emotionally restricted herself over the decades since the assault, turning away friends who tried to help her and stopping therapy when her counselor nudged a little too close to the truth. As Theresa Thompson explains in “Rituals of Male Violence: Unlocking the (Fe)Male Self in Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne,” “Jessie is chained in more ways than one: physically and socially . . . Her chains are not just very real Kreig police handcuffs, they are substantial metonyms for the [feminine] mystique itself, critical representatives of the legal and psychological systems that support myths of masculine dominance” (51). Jessie must free herself from the handcuffs, but she must also free herself from the invisible shackles that bind her as well, including social and cultural perceptions of acceptable female gender roles and femininity, by finding the courage to uncover her own memories and the voice to tell her own story. Dolores and Jessie are the only ones who can tell us about their experiences and actions, what they have endured and what they have survived. As Carol A. Senf argues in “Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne: Stephen King and the Evolution of an Authentic Female Narrative Voice,” “the narrative structure becomes King’s version of femaleness, and the novels give increasing power and articulation to those women’s voices” (93). Dolores alone can tell readers about the deaths of her husband, Joe St. George and her employer Vera Donovan—the first of whom she admits to having murdered and the latter whom she is suspecting of having murdered—because in both instances, she is the only other person who was there, the only one who knows the truth. Alone with her father on the day of the eclipse, only Jessie knows of her sexual molestation, an assault that she has long kept secret, even from herself. Both women are making a confession, though the SEXUAL VIOLENCE 91 natures and circumstances of those confessions differ dramatically. Dolo- res’s confession is made to legal authorities and at least in part criminal in nature, while Jessie’s is internal, self-revelatory, and therapeutic. Dolores makes hers voluntarily, while Jessie can only force herself to look into the shadow of the eclipse when there is no remaining alternative, other than death, left available to her. Despite these differences, both women’s confessions are potentially destructive, with Dolores facing prosecution and Jes- sie unsure of how she will be able to cope with her trauma, though both are simultaneously cathartic, secrets that they may well need to tell to save themselves in myriad ways. Through their suffering, these women have earned the right to have their stories told, to break their silences, and reveal their own secrets, on their own terms. As Dolores herself acknowledges, an island is a hard place to keep a secret. Little Tall Island is a small and close-knit community, insular and isolated, a place where people know one another’s secrets. As Canfield discusses the significance of this setting, it echoes the isolation faced by many victims of domestic violence as well, a theme which is prominent in Dolores Claiborne in Joe St. George’s abuse of Dolores and their children. Canfield explains that “King uses Little Tall as compelling microcosm of the larger society, using the island’s isolation as a metaphor for the isolation found in an abusive home . . . The islanders knew of Joe’s abuses, but they looked the other way, pointing to a recurring theme in domestic violence. Seeing no other alternative and getting no help from her neighbors, Dolores committed murder” (398). According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s (NCADV) most recent fact sheet, while men are also victims of domestic violence, this is a type of abuse that predominantly affects women, who make up 85 percent of domestic violence victims. According to the NCADV, “One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime,” with the violence most often committed by someone the woman knows (emphasis original). In addition, domestic violence encompasses much more than physical abuse, including a range of behaviors and actions that attempt to control and exert power over the other individual, as outlined in the NCADV wheel-shaped diagram of power and control, including coercion, threats, intimidation, emotional abuse, isolation, victim-blaming, economic dependence, and an environ- ment of patriarchal power structures based on male privilege. In addition to the abuse suffered by the woman herself, domestic violence also has a profound impact upon children in the house, which is evidenced in Joe St. George’s sexual abuse of Selena, bullying of Joe Jr., and troubling influence over little Pete. The influence of this abuse—or exposure to abuse—in childhood can have lifelong effects on children who grow up in households where domestic violence take place, including abuse of the 92 TEACHING STEPHEN KING children as well, and there is a higher chance of the children—especially male children—becoming abusers themselves, given that “Witnessing violence between one’s parents or caretakers is the strongest risk factor of transmit- ting violent behavior from one generation to the next” (National Coali- tion Against Domestic Violence). Readers get a glimpse of the generational nature of domestic abuse from Dolores’s perspective, where she initially took Joe’s abuse of her as a matter of course after having seen her mother abused by her father. As she tells her interviewers, “My own Dad used his hands on my Mum from time to time, and I suppose that was where I got the idear that it was all right—just somethin to be put up with” (Dolores Claiborne 87). This exposure to domestic abuse as a child proved a hurdle to Dolores standing up for herself against Joe; as she says, “Before I could do it, I had to once n for all rise above the memory of my Dad pushin my Mum down” (Dolores Claiborne 101), which is difficult but, as she finds when left with no other choice, possible. There are many different types of domestic violence portrayed in Dolores Claiborne, as they affect both Dolores and her children. While Dolores makes a stand early in the novel that Joe will never physically abuse her again, the abuse continues in different ways, including many of those outlined by the NCADV Wheel of Power and Control: intimidation, emotional abuse, economic control of the family’s finances, blaming Dolores for his abuse of her and later of Selena, and his belief in male privilege in the way he treats Dolores as a servant, there to cook, clean, and cater to his needs. Joe also abuses their children in a variety of ways, including his sexual abuse of his daughter Selena and his bullying of Joe Jr. On the surface, Joe has a good relationship with their youngest son, Pete, though Dolores is terrified by all of the different ways she sees little Pete turning into his father as he grows up, which is chilling in light of the statistics of how many children of abusers grow up to become abusers themselves. Regardless of the significant differences between all of these different types of domestic violence Joe commits against Dolores and the children, they all come back to the same central issue of power and control. In many ways, Joe arguably has little control over his own life: he is lower class, can’t hold down a steady job, and struggles with alcoholism. However, as the man of his own house, he is powerful, if only temporarily, a power he achieves by abusing his wife and children. In Gerald’s Game, Jessie suffers a single instance of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, who molests her when they are alone during the eclipse. Just as Joe convinced Selena that she had led him on and encouraged him, Jessie fears that the abuse is her own fault, suffering paroxysms of guilt and self-doubt that her body “had already started to change, and it had done something to her father that it had no business doing” (Gerald’s Game 223), and Selena and Jessie are both manipulated into seeing themselves as co-conspirators, forced to see themselves as similarly guilty alongside SEXUAL VIOLENCE 93 their abusers rather than as the victims they truly are. Dolores tells her interviewers that Joe told Selena “over n over again that I’d drive her out of the house if I ever found out what they was doin . . . What they was doin! Gorry!” (Dolores Claiborne 137, emphasis original), with Joe framing Selena as an active and willing participant rather than a victimized child. Jessie’s father manipulates her feelings of guilt and conspiracy deftly, first telling her that they have to confess to her mother about what happened, and only gradually capitulating to her panicked, desperate pleas that they instead keep it a secret, terrified that her mother will think it was her fault, until Jessie “had broken down utterly . . . weeping hysterically, begging him not to tell, promising him she would be a good girl forever and ever if he just wouldn’t tell” (Gerald’s Game 249). Sexually abused by their fathers, Selena and Jessie are further, more insidiously victimized by this manipulation after the fact, when each young woman holds herself responsible for the abuse she has suffered, emotional and psychological damage that will continue to impact each one’s life in small and large ways into their adulthood and shape the women they will grow to be. While abuse by men is the central conflict of these novels, at the hearts of Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game are the relationships between women, particularly Dolores’s relationship with her long-time employer Vera Donovan and Dolores’s complicated relationship with her daughter Selena in the former, and Jessie’s recollections of her college friend Ruth Neary in the latter. These women’s strength is central to each of those relationships. For example, Dolores acknowledges throughout the novel that Vera is a hard woman to work for and is often unlikable, such as when she is shouting about the proper number of clothespins or making her messes as Dolores vacuums. However, despite these challenges and despite the fact that their relationship is, on one level, that of an employer and her employee, they are also the most important people in one another’s lives as Vera ages and Dolores’s children leave the island. Similarly, while Dolores and Selena are close before the sexual abuse begins, their relationship is strained from that point on, marked by Selena’s guilt at telling and her suspicion of her mother following Joe’s death. They love one another and Dolores stops at nothing to protect her daughter, though the price they both pay, especially in the change in their relationship with one another, is almost too high to bear. Much like Dolores’s interviewers, Selena is an absent presence throughout the novel: while Dolores speaks of her frequently and Selena’s abuse was the catalyst for Dolores murdering Joe, Selena is gone from the island and has been for more than twenty years. Despite everything Dolores has done—and is still doing—to protect Selena, she comes to the sad conclusion that: 94 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

I think she did pay—that’s the worst part . . . She’s forty-four years old, she’s never married, she’s too thin (I can see that in the pitchers she sometimes sends), and I think she drinks—I’ve heard it in her voice more’n once when she calls. I got an idear that might be one of the reasons she don’t come home anymore; she doesn’t want me to see her drinkin like her father drank. Or maybe because she’s afraid of what she might say if she had one too many while I was right handy. What she might ask. (Dolores Claiborne 309–310)

Dolores’s description of Selena bears a striking resemblance to the psychological profile of childhood sexual abuse survivors, which is unsurprising given the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. As an article on the “Impact of Child Abuse” from the Adults Surviving Child Abuse (ASCA) group explains, “The impact of child abuse does not end when the abuse stops.” There are several common aftereffects that continue to impact the lives of adult survivors, who often experience negative impacts on their physical and medical health including general happiness levels, with abuse survivors “four times more likely to be unhappy even in much later life,” experience isolation and difficulty forming and sustaining relationships, and have increased instances of “suicidal behaviour, increased likelihood of smoking, substance abuse, and physical inactivity” (“Impact of Child Abuse”). Based on Dolores’s description of her now-adult daughter, Selena exhibits several of these traits. As far as her relationship with her mother goes, Selena also seems to be torn between suspecting her mother and blaming herself. As Dolores says of one of Selena’s visits, “I saw the same questions in her eyes then as had been there twelve years before, when she came up to me in the garden, amongst the beans and the cukes: ‘Did you do anything to him?’ and ‘Is it my fault?’ and ‘How long do I have to pay?’” (Dolores Claiborne 335). These questions can never be answered as long as Dolores is dedicated to protecting her daughter from the truth, which turns Selena outwardly against her mother and internally against herself. In Gerald’s Game, one of the many voices Jessie hears in her head as she struggles to escape is that of her acerbic college friend Ruth Neary, who Jessie hasn’t spoken to in years.2 A frank-talking and tough-loving woman, Ruth took Jessie along to a women’s consciousness group, where Jessie was moved to panic by another young woman’s shared story of violence and abuse at the hands of her brother and his friends, who raped her and burned her with cigarettes (Gerald’s Game 107). Ruth followed Jessie when she fled from the room and now, years later,

Jessie wondered what she had said to Ruth as they sat with their backs against the locked kitchen door and their arms around each other. The only thing she could remember for sure was something like “He never burned me, he never burned me, he never hurt me at all.” But there must have been SEXUAL VIOLENCE 95

more to it than that, because the questions Ruth had refused to stop asking had all pointed clearly in just one direction: Dark Score Lake and the day the sun had gone out . . . She had finally left Ruth rather than tell.Gerald’s ( Game 110)

Unable to face the truth of what she has endured, Jessie cuts off all potentially supportive relationships she shares with other women. However, once she has worked her way through these repressed memories, remembered what she has forgotten, and rejected the guilt with which her father for so long succeeded in binding her, she reaches out to Ruth, and the novel “concludes with Jessie’s telling her own story in her own voice and with her own words” (Senf, “Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne” 94) in a long, confessional letter to Ruth, and the tentatively hopeful possibility of female friendship restored. Though Dolores and Jessie are separated by hundreds of miles and find themselves at dramatically different times in their lives—after all, Jessie is much closer to Selena in age and circumstance than she is to Dolores— they are united by the horror of sexual violence and abuse and what one has to do, to others and within oneself, to survive.

Rose Madder

Rose Madder begins in medias res, as the reader is dropped into a typical suburban living room in the immediate aftermath of one of Norman’s frequent assaults on Rose, as she cowers in agony, struggling to breathe. Entering into the story in the midst of Rose’s pain, readers share in that agony, her suffering, her hopelessness. This abuse profoundly shapes Rose’s characterization, her past, and the choices she makes for her future. Like Joe St. George in Dolores Claiborne and Tom Mahout in Gerald’s Game, Norman Daniels in Rose Madder is an abusive man, though these men’s means of abuse are quite distinct. They all exploit the powerlessness of their victims, though Joe and Tom’s abuses are more covert, shrouded in silence and secrecy even within the family, while Norman’s is more overt, violent rather than manipulative, and fueled by rage rather than a lack of power, which he has plenty of, socially speaking, as a police officer. In the Psychology Today article “Behind the Veil: Inside the Mind of Men That Abuse,” John G. Taylor identifies several key characteristics of abusers, including jealousy, controlling behavior, isolation of the abused, forcing the abused to have sex against their will, and belief in and demand for the adherence to traditional gender roles (Taylor). As Taylor continues, abusers are often “very clever, smart, and extremely charming,” with the ability to easily “deceive and manipulate” others. As a result, these secretive 96 TEACHING STEPHEN KING abusers are often not recognized by those outside of the home, and Taylor draws a comparison between these men and Stevenson’s classic figure of duality in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, due to “the stark contrast in their public and private selves” (Taylor). These three men in Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, and Rose Madder represent a continuum of the public faces of abusers: while almost everyone on Little Tall Island knows what kind of man Joe St. George is and they assume he abuses his wife and children, Tom Mahout seems to remain above suspicion, and Norman is adept at presenting a more acceptable public face when he chooses to (which is usually when it suits his purposes), even though his “temper” is well known among his fellow policemen. In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare asks the question “what’s in a name?” (III. ii. 43). Names, the power of naming, identity, and choice are very important in Rose Madder, particularly with Rosie herself. Like Dolores in Dolores Claiborne, Rosie begins by reclaiming her maiden name after she flees from her husband, becoming Rosie McClendon instead of Rose Daniels. She also adamantly sees herself as Rosie, or as is repeated throughout the novel, “Really Rosie,” rather than Rose.3 In fact, this name is one of the first things that opens her up to a potential romantic relationship with Bill Steiner: in calling her Rosie, he sees her as she sees herself, rather than who he wants her to be (Rose Madder 159). Rosie also further distinguishes different parts of her identity and experiences in her separation of herself from Miss Practical-Sensible, who makes her first appearance as Rosie contemplates leaving and then makes the first step toward this escape (Rose Madder 30). Miss Practical-Sensible echoes another one of Jessie Burlingame’s voices in Gerald’s Game, that of Goodwife Burlin- game, who admonishes Jessie to be good, quiet, and not make a fuss when she tells Gerald she has changed her mind about sex and he sets out to rape her anyway. As Lant and Thompson argue, “many key aspects of King’s representations of women appear firmly entrenched in a patriarchal economy of domesticity. An overwhelming sense of socially condoned masculinist violence and trespass haunts his women and men and their relations within these domestic spaces” (6), a status quo of which Miss Practical-Sensible and Goodwife Burlingame serve as enthusiastic mouthpieces. Both Miss Practical-Sensible and Goodwife Burlingame are the voices of “proper,” submissive, traditional femininity, personified conservative gender expectations that threaten to keep Rosie and Jessie in destructive relationships and patterns if they cannot somehow find the strength to silence these voices and rise above them. There is one final Rose integral to the novel, the titular Rose Madder of the painting Rosie falls in love with at the pawn shop. The painting has no title or artist name and bears only the simple inscription of “Rose Madder” on the painting’s paper backing. Featuring SEXUAL VIOLENCE 97 a woman looking down upon the ruins of a temple, the painting takes on fantastic significance in Rosie’s life, with the woman featured there becoming an inspiration and a symbol of strength and bravery as Rosie begins her new life, as Rose Madder is the externalization of Rosie’s darker self and the rage she has long suppressed. The painting also allows Rosie to claim a power and agency that she was denied in her marriage to Norman, because in the other world she finds there, “abusive men did not get off scot-free and powerful women were the leaders. Rose proved her strength in this other world” (Canfield 393), a moment of personal growth and reclaimed self-worth that carries over into the “real” world on the other side of the frame as well. After making her escape and finding some possibility for a new life hundreds of miles from Norman, Rosie finds safe haven with Daughters & Sis- ters, a residential women’s shelter than offers women security and a chance to begin new lives. In the focus on this mutually supportive community, King moves beyond the personal experiences of individual women to more expansively consider the social and cultural issues surrounding and potential interventions in response to domestic violence within a larger scope. Shelters and safe houses are, historically speaking, a relatively new development. As the Advocates for Human Rights group explains, “The shelter and safehouse movement in the United States began in the early 1970s . . . [When] one of the most critical issues facing victims was the absence of alternative housing” (Advocates). Daughters & Sisters has several features that are characteristic of such shelters and safehouses, including the resources and transitional housing described as Rosie gets back on her feet and their focus on residents’ safety. As the Advocates for Human Rights group explains, “Some shelters work to ensure resident security by keeping the shelter’s location a secret . . . Many women are stalked and killed by their former partners after they leave. Being able to keep their location a secret not only protects women from these batterers but can also enhance their feeling of being safe” (Advocates). This is evident in Rosie’s journey to Daughters & Sisters, to which she is referred through a nearly invisible network of supporters, beginning with Peter Slowik at the bus station. Further security measures are put in place as well, with the intercom and camera system that Rosie encounters when she finally finds her way to the house. As Canfield writes, it is at Daughters & Sisters that Rose “discovers that she was not alone, that other women had experienced domestic abuse as well. It is also here that she learned self-defense, a way to fight back . . . [highlighting the] importance of these types of homes as not only physical shelters for women, but emotional refuges” (398), a representation that was especially significant in a political climate that dramatically cut funding to many of these shelters (Canfield 398). 98 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

King combines the real life context of domestic violence survivors and safe houses with the supernatural and fantastic, and Rose Madder draws on a wide variety of genre influences, including fairy tales, mythology, and magic realism, creating a rich and multi-layered text. While fairy tales have been a staple of children’s literature for generations, the original versions of these fairy tales were often more dark than Disney. As Jesse Greenspan writes in “The Dark Side of the Grimm Fairy Tales,” there are several disturbing themes in these common tales, including premarital sex, graphic violence, child abuse, anti-Semitism, incest, and wicked mothers (Greens- pan). Consider these familiar tales: Cinderella is essentially an indentured servant to her family, abused by her stepmother and stepsisters; in the Grimm fairy tale version, the stepsisters try to trick the prince by cutting off bits of their feet to fit into the slipper and when Cinderella prevails, she invites them to the wedding, where birds peck out their eyes on the way to and from the ceremony (Grimm 85–86). Or there’s Snow White, who eats a poisoned apple from her wicked stepmother and falls into a death-like sleep, to be awakened by the kiss of the handsome prince; in the Grimm version, when Snow White marries the prince, her stepmother is ordered to come to the wedding and dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies (Grimm 336). Intended for children, the Disney versions of these familiar stories are significantly sanitized and much more closely aligned with the romantic tradition. However, another notable feature of these fairy tales— whether Grimm or Disney—is the way in which they outline traditional female gender roles as diametrically opposed, with good girls rewarded and bad women destroyed. Rose Madder has several clear fairy tale allusions, of both the classic and Disney varieties. When Rosie discovers the cricket in her apartment, she sets him free, telling him to “Go on, Jiminy” (Rose Mad- der 190). In her growing relationship with Bill, she felt “as if she had been asleep, not just now . . . but for years and years, like Snow White after the apple” (Rose Madder 213, emphasis original). Later, in the painting’s maze, with a handful of seeds, Rosie finds that “All at once she knew what the seeds were for: she was Gretel underground, with no brother to share her fear” (Rose Madder 259). In addition to these fairy tale references, Rose Madder is also rich with mythological allusions as well. The blonde woman in the painting is simultaneously powerful and terrifying. As the woman’s handmaiden tells Rosie, “Girl, don’t you look straight at her . . . That’s not for the likes of you” (Rose Madder 236). This description echoes that of Greek mythology’s Medusa, the monstrous Gorgon, a glimpse of whom would turn the gazer to stone. However, Medusa wasn’t always monstrous. As Beth J. Seelig explains in “The Rape of Medusa in the Temple of Athena: Aspects of Triangulation in The Girl,” “Medusa was originally a very beautiful young girl, especially SEXUAL VIOLENCE 99 renowned for the beauty of her hair. Her tragedy began with her rape in the temple of Athena. Accounts of who raped her vary, some saying it was Zeus, others Poseidon” (898). Following this rape, Athena cursed Medusa, turning her into the fearsome creature she has become, with a head full of terrifying snakes. In her appearance and her power, “Medusa’s head is both a mirror and a mask. It is the mirror of collective violence which leaves the Devil’s mark on the individual, as well as being the image of death for those who look at it” (Bogan). Medusa—and the woman in Rosie’s painting—are strong and destructive, an inspiration and a horror. When Rosie is sent on her quest to rescue the baby within the painting’s maze, she delves further into the world of mythology and more specifically, into the underworld. Within the mythic world, the River Styx separates the worlds of the living and the dead. Rosie crosses a river as she descends further into the world of the painting, though this is more akin to mythology’s River Lethe, “the river of forgetfulness” (Dawson), which is a great temptation for Rosie. Though the handmaiden warns her not to drink from the river, Rosie thinks of her life with Norman and all of the abuse she has suffered, reflecting that some things may be better off forgotten, nightmares of which she can finally let go Rose( Madder 250). However, she’s able to draw on her strength and resolve, to cross the river without drinking. In another mythological allusion, Rose treads near the footsteps of Persephone, the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythology, a beautiful young woman who was kidnapped and “became queen of the underworld as the abducted wife of Hades” (Cotterell and Storm 74). While Zeus intervenes and Persephone is only required to spend one-third of the year in the underworld, “Persephone could never return entirely to the living world because she had eaten in Hades’ realm: a very old idea that strictly divided the food of the dead from that of the living” (Cotterell and Storm 75). In most accounts of Persephone’s story, this food was either a pomegranate or pomegranate seeds, and this is the fruit that comes to Rosie’s mind, though she knows that the fruit she finds within the world of the painting is not quite a pomegranate, that this is a fruit with its own unique, dark power, as “The tips of her fingers went numb right away . . . At the same time, the most wonderful aroma filled her nose” (Rose Mad- der 255) as she collects the seeds she’ll need. As with crossing the river of forgetfulness, Rosie is tempted to eat of the fruit, a temptation that also echoes Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge, and the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. She resists, though she comes very close to absentmind- edly putting her fingers in her mouth. Reflecting on this combination of myth and creation story, Rosie thinks to herself “It’s not the Tree of Good and Evil . . . It’s not the Tree of Life either. I think this is the Tree of Death” (Rose Madder 255, emphasis original). 100 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

The world within Rose Madder’s painting and the maze at its center also have mythological origins. The most famous maze of Greek mythology was that designed by Daedalus for King Minos and was home to the monstrous Minotaur, a half bull/half man creature, who was sustained with annual human sacrifices, when youth were sent into the maze as tributes, where they were killed and devoured, until Theseus fought and defeated the Minotaur (Cotterell and Storm 84). In Rose Madder, Norman first takes on the image of the bull when he steals a child’s rubber mask of Ferdinand the Bull (355). Munro Leaf’s children’s book The Story of Ferdinand is about a bull who is very gentle and refuses to fight, preferring instead to lay under his favorite tree and smell the flowers. Obviously, this kind nature couldn’t be more opposite of Norman Daniels’s cruelty and beastliness. Ferdinand is a fascinating parallel to the bull of the maze, Erinyes, with Rose Madder referring to both as one. As Rose Madder asks Rosie, “Have you forgotten that Erinyes is blind?” (Rose Madder 433). Rosie is concerned and “thought to say, You’re confused, ma’am, this is my husband we’re talking about, not the bull in the maze. Then she remembered the mask Norman was wearing and said nothing” (ibid., emphasis original). Rose Madder combines this wide range of representations of the bull to create a complex set of references and negotiations about women, power, violence, and the intersection of man and beast. In his essay on “Mythic Quality and Popular Reading in Stephen King’s Rose Madder,” Roberto de Sousa Causo argues that “King distorts the myth in order to fit his own needs of confusing Norman with the monster: The creature in the maze isn’t exactly the Minotaur, since it’s a bull, and it’s called Erinyes, a name which means fury, and is one of Demeter’s epithets. Later the bull becomes Norman, or Norman becomes the bull: the monster is a metaphor for the less than human male” (363). When Norman breaks into Daughters & Sisters, he is uncomfortable and jumpy, overwhelmed by the feminine atmosphere of the house, to which Ferd responds that “This is where Circe turns men into pigs, after all . . . Yas, dis be de place” (Rose Madder 376, emphasis original). As with many of the references and allusions from the second half of the novel, Circe is a figure from Greek mythology, best known for her role in Homer’s Odyssey, where she turned Odysseus’s men into animals, a further negotiation of the complex fluidity between man and beast in Rose Madder. In the final section ofRose Madder, both Rosie and Norman undergo dramatic transformations. Internally, Norman continues to slip even further into insanity, starting to experience blanks in time and hearing voices, including Ferdinand the Bull’s and his abusive dead father’s. Externally, Norman begins to literally become the bull whose mask he wears. First, he discovers that he cannot take the mask off and soon the mask becomes one with him as he transforms—or at least his head does—into that of the SEXUAL VIOLENCE 101 blind, one-eyed bull Erinyes: “the mask wouldn’t come off no matter how hard he yanked at it, and he knew with sickening surety that if he raked his nails into it, he would feel pain. He would bleed, and yes, there was just the one eyehole, and that one seemed to have moved right into the center of his face” (Rose Madder 436, emphasis original). After masquerading as the bull to disguise and protect himself, Norman has literally, physically become the bull, or at least a half-bull combination of Erinyes and the Minotaur of Greek mythology. Rosie undergoes a significant transformation in the final section of novel as well, discovering a well of icy rage within herself. As she directs Bill through the world of the painting, “she heard coldness and calculation in her voice. She hated that sound . . . but she liked it too” (Rose Madder 418). After finding that she had the hardness and anger within herself to hear Norman being killed with no remorse, she discovers that this rage follows her back into her everyday life, threatening her existence and her relationships with those she loves. Physically, Rosie’s transformation is less dramatic than Norman’s, as she briefly turns into Rose Madder, the angry woman from her painting. As Bill says, looking at Rosie in the world of the painting, “You look like someone else . . . Someone dangerous” (Rose Madder 418). Though Rosie returns, both to her real world and her original appearance, she has “penetrated a parallel world of fantasy (imagination), and in that world she found the strength to face the struggle to reconstruct herself and to fight her enemy. But now she has to live in the real world and the pressure of daily life quickly dilutes the powers of that experience. She needs to incorporate something of that transcendental feeling of the fantasy world into her routine” (de Sousa Causo 364) in order to survive and reconcile the two worlds, the fantasy and the reality. Once she and Bill are out of the painting, this internal transformation proves difficult for Rosie to shake and impossible to eradicate completely, for better or worse, the impact of the abuse she has suffered and the strength she has claimed. 8

Coming of Age Stories

ome of King’s most powerful tales feature the coming of age stories of Schildren crossing the threshold into young adulthood. This is a moment at which many high school and college students find themselves as well, complete with their own developing identities and uncertainties about the future, and King’s coming of age stories can strike a particularly powerful chord with young adult readers. One of King’s best known coming of age stories is The Body (included in the 1982 collection Different Seasons), which is often better known by the name of its film adaptation, Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986). Despite the dead body of the title of which the boys go in search, there are no supernatural or ghostly horrors, as King focuses instead on the bond between four young men and the different paths their lives are about to set them upon as they move toward adulthood. A darker coming of age tale, also in Different Seasons, is Apt Pupil, in which Todd Bowden, a boy who is struggling with some of these same questions, befriends an elderly Nazi war criminal in hiding, who takes Todd under his wing and turns him into a monster. Finally, while The Body and Apt Pupil consider the coming of age quests of young men, King’s first novel, Carrie highlights the horrors faced—and inflicted—by a high school girl as she struggles to define herself, with the real-life coming of age turmoil here veering into the supernatural with Carrie’s telekinetic power, though the cliques and bullying described are all too familiar in the real lives of contemporary young adult readers.1 The coming of age stories featured in King’s work span a wide range of adolescence and young adulthood, from the 12-year-old children of The Body to 16-year-old Carrie White, and these coming of age stories are resolved with varying degrees of success. As Ann Casano defines the coming of age genre tradition of the bildungsroman, “the main character has to experience some form of moral development. In essence, they have to grow up. The focus of the character’s growth is the main thrust of the narrative.” Within the context of the bildungsroman, the protagonist struggles with 104 TEACHING STEPHEN KING who he or she is, who they will become as an adult, what path their life will take, and how they will position themselves within and relate to the wider world and its social structure. Casano goes on to outline several key characteristics of the bildungsroman, most of which focus on the development of an individual character and his or her significant change over the course of the narrative. As Casano explains, “There is a search for meaning by the protagonist, who is usually foolish and inexperienced at the beginning of the narrative.” This search is often prompted by some key loss or trauma, motivating the protagonist to undertake a significant personal journey, the path of which is strewn with challenges, tests, and failure (Casano). At a pivotal moment within this journey, “There is usually an epiphany, or a flashing moment where the hero finally ‘gets it.’ This lucidity changes them as a person. They learn what it takes to be a grown up in the real world” (Casano). This bildungsroman also echoes the journey of Joseph Campbell’s mythic hero,2 as this realization transcends the personal and emphasizes societal responsibility and in the successfully achieved bildungsroman, “The hero will eventually find his place in society by accepting its values and rules . . . [The hero] has grown as a person from page one and at the very least he is equipped with the maturity and knowledge to have a chance in life” (Casano). As Jonathan P. Davis explains in Stephen King’s America, King’s child protagonists “are forced at some point to exit the gates of purity and enter the arena of adulthood, which occurs through some initial earth- shattering discovery that causes them to recognize the imperfections of their world” (48). Once they have seen the world through these adult eyes, they cannot reclaim their childlike innocence and are set upon the journey which will begin transforming them into the adults they are to become. Some of King’s coming of age stories, such as that of Gordie Lachance in The Body, proceed to a successful resolution, while others are ultimately ineffective, ending in death and destruction, though all highlight the challenges of identity and belonging faced by young men and women, a maturation process that remains vibrant and volatile, whether in the nostalgic 1950s setting of The Body or the more contemporary setting tapped into with Kimberly Peirce’s recent film adaptation of Carrie (2013).

The Body

In The Body, a quartet of boys set off an adventure, prompted by one question: “Do you guys want to go see a dead body?” (Body 299). However, as Gordon “Gordie” Lachance, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio make their way through the woods to find the body of Ray Brower, their journey becomes not a lark, but a serious quest, one which will transform them individually and as a group. The narrator, Gordie Lachance, is COMING OF AGE STORIES 105 recounting this story of his childhood from the long-range vantage point of a grown man, as he struggles to put his adolescent truth into words that can carry the weight of what he wants to express. Korinna Csetényi ana- lyzes the unique nature of this narrative position, as Gordie “frequently jumps forward and backward in time. In the manner of Charles Dickens’s character, Pip, there is the older, mature Gordon, recounting his singular summer adventure.” King begins the novella from the perspective of adult Gordie and his reflection that The“ most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them— words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out” (Body 293, emphasis original). Despite the difficulty of the telling and the very real possibility that his words cannot live up to the truth he is striving to communicate, it is a story that Gordie must tell, one that made him into the man he has become, and it is through this dual perspective of an adult recalling his childhood self that Gordie recounts his story. Interspersed with the story of the boys’ trek to see Ray Brower’s corpse, The Body also includes a couple of Gordie’s short stories published when he was a young man, as well as his adult reflections, touched with nostalgia and a bent toward the philosophical. This narrative complexity provides readers with a variety of perspectives from which to consider Gordie’s personal bildungsroman and the revelation of Gordie as not just a boy, but also as a young man and later, as an adult, highlighting not only the transformative journey itself, but the echoes of its significance and its repercussions across decades of Gordie’s life to come. While the boys’ decision to go see the body of Ray Brower—a boy reported missing and presumed dead, but not yet found, except by Vern’s thuggish older brother Billy and his pal Charlie Hogan—is a grand adventure out into the great unknown. It is equally significant, if not more so, as an escape. In Castle Rock, Gordie and his friends find themselves in constant conflict with their elders, a group which includes “a variety of personal oppressors . . . [including their] parents, the storekeeper, the dumpkeeper and his dog, [and] the older boys” (Biddle 86). In discovering who they are, the boys must first pull away from where they’ve come from, a separation that is especially significant given the contentious family dynamics of each. As Jeffrey Weinstock writes in “Maybe It Shouldn’t Be a Party: Kids, Keds, and Death in Stephen King’s Stand By Me and Pet Sematary,” “each one of these boys . . . is already missing something or is, on some level, scarred” (42). Gordie’s older brother Dennis was his parents’ favored son and with Dennis’s recent death, Gordie has become an “invisible man” (Body 310) in his own home, superseded by his parents’ grief and largely ignored. When Dennis is alive, he is the target of their parents’ love and attention and after Dennis dies, Gordie lives in the shadow 106 TEACHING STEPHEN KING of his brother’s memory, once again tangential and largely unnoticed. While Gordie is neglected and ignored, Chris and Teddy are faced with much more overt abuse: Chris’s drunken father beats him, while Teddy’s father presses his son’s ears to a hot woodstove burner plate before being taken away to a VA hospital psychiatric ward (Body 296). Both Chris and Teddy must also continuously contend with their father’s legacies. Adults write Chris off as a no-good thief and “Everyone expects him to live up to the poor reputation, well-established by his delinquent brothers and his abusive, alcoholic father, who regularly beats him. He desperately tries to avoid being typecast, but the entire community seems to work against his desire” (Csetényi). In contrast, Teddy constantly defends his father, whom he loves with a single-minded and worshipful devotion, in spite of his abuse, and “Teddy’s disfigured ears and hearing impairment stand a constant reminder that sometimes the person entrusted with a child’s well- being might also present the greatest threat to it” (Csetényi). Finally, like Gordie, Vern lives in the shadow of his older brother Billy, though instead of being a golden boy, Billy is a juvenile delinquent who beats his younger brother, usually under the radar of their ineffectual parents. Expanding out beyond these immediate family relationships, the boys find little in the adult world upon which they can trust or depend. Due to his family’s reputation, when milk money goes missing at school, Chris is immediately the number one suspect; he did steal the milk money but, caught by his conscience, turned it in to his teacher, who kept it for herself, letting Chris take the fall and a three-day suspension (Body 382–383). When Gordie stops at a small shop to get them provisions for their trip, the shopkeeper George Dusset attempts to cheat Gordie, with one thumb on the scale as he weighs the boys’ hamburger, tries to overcharge Gordie, and becomes hostile when Gordie calls him on both: “What are you, kid? . . . Are you some kind of smartass?” (Body 344), before throwing Gordie out of the store. The boys as a group fare no better with Milo Pressman, who runs the town dump and bullies Teddy, calling him a “looney” and making fun of Teddy’s father (Body 348), before threatening to call all of the boys’ parents. From their parents to their teachers and even adults they encounter in their casual day-to-day existence, such as Dusset and Pressman, the boys’ relationships with adults are conflicted, contentious, and often abusive, presenting “a rather dark view of society, full of mean, hypocritical and weak adult figures” (Csetényi). As Arthur W. Biddle explains in “The Mythic Journey in ‘The Body,’” Gordie and his friends have “been scarred by the adult world and denied its love” (87), a harsh reality which makes their coming of age even more essential. They cannot rely on the adult world to care for them or be there to provide them with guidance and support when they need COMING OF AGE STORIES 107 it, so they must construct a world of their own, finding their own identities and places within it. As they move forward with their lives, crossing the threshold from childhood to early adulthood, they do so through their bond with one another and their search for a dead boy, a kid their own age named Ray Brower who disappeared while picking blueberries and was hit by a train. The initial draw for Gordie and his friends is to find Brower’s body and be seen as heroes, perhaps gaining some of the adult attention and approval which endlessly eludes them, though the journey becomes an end in and of itself. As Gordie says, “There’s a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens” (Body 402), and the “magic corridor” he and his friends walk down takes them along a set of train tracks and through the Maine woods. They walk and along the way, find themselves and one another, as well as the body of Ray Brower at the journey’s end. In seeing Ray Brower’s body, the boys come to terms with their own mortality, both individually and as a collective group; for Gordie in particular, “Ray’s body helps him digest the experience of death and dying, something he was unable to do when his brother died” (Csetényi). In addition to this new understanding and the attendant maturation that comes from the boys’ experience, their defense of Ray Brower’s body against the older boys also provides them an opportunity to assert their masculinity. In turning back their older brothers, even under the threat of beatings sure to come, they have proven themselves to be no longer boys, but men. As Davis argues, The Body is King’s “tour de force of coming of age stories . . . [which] por- trays young people as having the inner strength to make the transition from innocence to experience” (55). Transformed by the stories they tell, the fears they share, and the horrors they overcome—a screaming cry in the dark woods, leeches, the threats of the older boys—Gordie and his friends return home different than when they set out, boys taking their first steps into young manhood, with a burgeoning understanding of the harsh realities of the world that await them, including Chris’s cataclysmic revelation to Gordie that “Your friends drag you down . . . You can’t save them. You can only drown with them” (Body 384). In the midst of their strongest camaraderie and their all-encompassing friendship, Gordie must return home knowing that life will change, that the deep love and loyalty he feels for his friends is insupportable. As Magistrale argues in Hollywood’s Stephen King, this trip into the woods signals “The death of their friendly foursome, the death of their summer, and most important, the death of their own childhoods” (38). Gordie must make sacrifices as he grows up and becomes a man, and he has gotten his first glimpse of those losses on this journey with his friends. 108 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

This coming of age is successful for Gordie, though the same is not true for his friends. Gordie writes his story from the perspective of a grown man; he is a husband and father, as well as a successful author, with his childhood dreams realized. The Body combines this complex narrative perspective by foregrounding Gordie’s childhood experiences, colored through the nostalgia of his adult point of view and further supplemented with the inclusion of a couple of Gordie’s early stories, as “Stud City” and “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan” fill in some of the blanks of the intervening years.3 But he is also the only one of his original group of friends still living. Teddy and Vern’s deaths are almost expected, following the pattern of their family histories and others’ low expectations of them, with Teddy dying in a car accident while driving drunk after being rejected by the Air Force and Vern killed in an apartment fire (432). Chris’s life—and death—is more unexpected, as he refuses others’ perceptions of him and works his way through the college-track courses side by side with Gordie, going on to college and then studying law before being stabbed trying to break up a fight at a fast food restaurant. The strength and solidarity that Chris demonstrated with his childhood friends, his defining characteristic, was also what would get him killed; as Gordie says, when the two men began fighting, “Chris, who had always been the best of us at making peace, stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat” (Body 435). Chris, Teddy, and Vern had the deck stacked against them ever getting out of Castle Rock or stepping out from under the shadows cast by their fathers and brothers, and although Chris beat those odds, his life is cut short by brutal and senseless violence.

Apt Pupil

While Chris, Vern, and Teddy’s coming of age journeys are cut short by circumstance or tragedy, the same cannot be said of 13-year-old Todd Bowden, the young male protagonist of King’s novella Apt Pupil, which Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner consider as “among the grimmest pieces King has ever written” (304). Todd Bowden is—or at least seems to be—a “total all-American kid” (Apt Pupil 111) when he first shows up on the doorstep of Arthur Denker. However, Denker is really Kurt Dussander, a fugitive Nazi war criminal and despite his seeming nor- malcy, Todd is far from a regular kid. Rather than approaching Dussander out of fear or simple curiosity, he comes to blackmail Dussander, to trade his silence regarding the old man’s identity for first-hand details of the war, especially the concentration camps Dussander ran at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz (Apt Pupil 114), and his later reputation as “The Blood Fiend of COMING OF AGE STORIES 109

Patin” (Apt Pupil 115). While Todd is an intelligent boy and does well in school, his true passion and curiosity lie in these horrifying crimes against humanity, a curiosity which quickly grows into an erotically charged and all-consuming obsession as Todd “becomes increasingly corrupted by the stories of murder he hears in exchange for not revealing his discovery to the authorities” (Mahoney 25). Todd tells Dussander “I really groove on all that concentration camp stuff” (Apt Pupil 119). As a younger boy, looking through a stack of his friend’s dad’s war magazines, Todd noticed that

All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But all the stories were continued in the back of the book, and when you turned to those pages, the words saying it was bad were surrounded by ads, and these ads sold German knives and belts and helmets . . . These ads sold German flags emblazoned with swastikas and Nazi Lugers and a game called Panzer Attack . . . They said it was bad, but it seemed like a lot of people must not mind. (121)

Considering this discrepancy, Todd thought to himself “I want to know about everything that happened in those places . . . And I want to know which is more true—the words, or the ads they put beside the words” (Apt Pupil 121, emphasis original). Drawn in by what Dennis F. Mahoney calls “the commercialization and fetishization of the Holocaust” (27), Todd is consumed by this fascination and his dark fixation. It is this question, and the growing obsession that accompanies it, which brings Todd to Dussander’s door. Todd returns to Dussander’s house regularly, telling his parents that he is reading to the old man, as he demands to be told everything Dussander has done, every detail the old man can remember. As Todd tells Dussander, he wants to hear about “The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens . . The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff” (Apt Pupil 129). Despite initial resistance, Dussander opens his memory to Todd, sharing the atrocities of his past as the boy listens eagerly, demanding more stories and ever more explicit details. From an outside perspective, Todd is a regular kid, just as on the surface, his relationship with Dussander is a reciprocal one, with a young boy soaking up the wisdom of an elder, while he helps the older man by reading to him. However, “Just as he has sub- verted so many long-accepted conventions of Americana over the years, here King takes a small-town conceit and relationship worthy of Norman Rockwell and inverts it, turning the innocence of that Saturday Evening Post image into a perversely insightful study of evil” (Wiater, Golden, and Wagner 304–305). As Magistrale argues of this relationship in Hollywood’s Stephen King, “King’s portrayal of evil most often appears to require an 110 TEACHING STEPHEN KING active, illicit bond between a male (often in the role of a father or father surrogate) and a younger, formerly innocent individual (often in the role of biological or surrogate progeny) who is initiated into sin” (85). The relationship and balance of power between Todd and Dussander is complex and mutually destructive: Todd is the child, though he holds Dussander’s fate in his hands. However, this newfound power and Todd’s sense of himself as in control of the situation slips away as their relationship grows and deepens, since if Dussander’s identity comes to light now, Todd himself will be implicated as well, for having known about the man’s true identity and kept it to himself, not to mention his prurient and self-serving motivations for doing so. The balance of power is constantly shifting and negotiated throughout the novella and “the question of who is the exploiter and who is the victim . . . bears careful watching” (Magistrale, Hollywood’s 111). Todd initially defined his relationship with Dussander based on his power over the old man and the benefits that power could afford him—namely, forbidden knowledge—but as Dussander’s control of the situation increases and even threatens to eclipse Todd’s own, Todd has only his all-consuming, addictive obsession and the fear that it will be found out. Both Todd and Dussander fall into long and destructive downward spi- rals. Todd’s grades begin to plummet. He has nightmares, in some of which he is a camp prisoner and in others, he wears an SS uniform (Apt Pupil 146); in still others, he occupies an ultimate position of power and control as he tortures and rapes a bound female camp prisoner (Apt Pupil 189– 190). His grip on reality begins to slip as he finds himself increasingly pre- occupied with violent fantasies. Dussander has his own nightmares as well, though in telling his stories to Todd, he finds himself filled with renewed vitality: “When he talked to the boy, he could call back the old days. His memories of those days was perversely clear . . . Were a few bad dreams too high a price to pay?” (Apt Pupil 149). The stories Dussander tells have a powerful hold over Todd and forge their relationship, as the “language . . . serves as the vehicle for [Todd’s] corruption, as he increasingly becomes a vampiric extension of the evil that Dussander implants within him and that will become ‘undead’ through him” (Mahoney 28). In the end, these stories transform them both, connecting the past and the present, the living and the dead: “The illicit nature of their behavior acts like a drug—demanding more details, greater levels of barbarism, until narrative crosses into action, past merges with present, and history becomes ‘their story’” (Mahoney 35). Drawn increasingly further into their own dark obsessions and into their mutually destructive relationship with one another, Todd and Dussander push each other to—and eventually beyond—their limits. As Todd’s violence and madness continue to consume him, he externally continues to put on the face of a regular, normal young man. Todd appears to be an COMING OF AGE STORIES 111 ideal, bright, college-bound student: he is on the varsity football and baseball teams, wins an essay contest on “An American’s Responsibility,” wins his school’s “Athlete of the Year” award, gets high grades, and has a good relationship with his parents (Apt Pupil 212). Underneath this idyllic, suburban façade, however, all is not well with Todd. After a year of nightmares and indulging in violent fantasies, Todd brings this violence to life when he kills a wino with a hammer (Apt Pupil 210). As Magistrale writes in “Inherited Haunts: Stephen King’s Terrible Children,” Todd’s new passion lies in “stalking and butchering helpless drunks and street people” (72). Todd’s relationships become corrupted as well, as “his emerging sexuality is stimulated only by perverse fantasies of women in bondage forced to suffer sadistic violations . . . and his relationship with his parents, formerly characterized by a playful intimacy, is now clouded by Todd’s need to sus- tain elaborate barriers between the vicious self he is becoming and their images of the innocent child he had been” (ibid.). Todd has pursued, and in some respects, arguably fulfilled his obsessive quest, though he finds that no amount of power or blood will ever satisfy him and, trapped within his own atrocities, he can never again be innocent or safe. In some ways, Todd’s coming of age is successful, if darkly perverted. After all, he has crossed the threshold from childhood into young adulthood, through “the dissolution of the all-conference, all-American child, to the emergence of the corrupt adult who has lost sight of all moral principles” (Magistrale, “Inherited Haunts” 72). Todd begins to realize this change within himself early on, reflecting that “He had many adult thoughts these days. Most of them were not so great” (199). When he and Dussander share a drink to celebrate Todd’s improved grades, Magistrale argues that “The bourbon Todd consumes is symbolic of the corruption inherent in King’s adult world, a realm in which Dussander serves as high priest. The jelly-glass Todd uses to drink the whiskey, of course, represents the childhood from which he has forever broken” (“Inherited Haunts” 73). Todd even sees the murder of the winos and his own pragmatic approach to these acts of violence as an integral part of his maturation and self- actualization and he thinks that “Really, he was no different than anybody. You had to make your own way in the world; if you were going to get along, you had to do it by yourself” (Apt Pupil 212). Todd feels the need to kill to keep himself sane, to keep his nightmares from consuming him, and the winos are the perfect target as he depersonalizes them and makes them nearly interchangeable in his mind, while at the same time reassuring himself that “their time of usefulness as human creatures was over. Except their usefulness to Todd, of course” (ibid.). In the end, neither Dussander nor Todd can maintain their respective disguises: Dussander is recognized by a former camp prisoner and 112 TEACHING STEPHEN KING commits suicide to avoid being tried as a war criminal, and when Todd’s machinations are discovered, he shoots his former school guidance counselor and then takes aim at a nearby freeway, firing on passing motorists until the police kill him (Apt Pupil 290).

Carrie

The bildungsroman has traditionally focused on the maturation and transformation of young men. However, an extension of this narrative tradition is the female bildungsroman. As Laura Pressman explains in “TheFrauro- man: A Female Perspective in Coming of Age Stories,” “Female bildung- sromane in contemporary literature and film are able to explore issues that those of the past were unable to mention. Sexuality, higher education, and other aspects of society that were once off-limits to female writers (particularly when writing about women) are now described and explored extensively because of the shift in cultural norms.” A common feature of the female bildungsroman that distinguishes it from its male counterpart is the frequent “inclusion of a love story as part of a girl’s growing up. While works of previous centuries centered on marriage as the conclusion, many contemporary works still incorporate romantic relationships as a key component of the protagonist’s development” (Pressman), a concern not usually featured in boy’s coming of age stories. While The Body and Apt Pupil feature the self-exploration and camaraderie of young men, King’s first novel Carrie features the transformation of a young woman, the eponymous and unforgettable Carrie White. King writes early in Christine that “losers” are an integral part of the high school social scene, generally with one of each gender (1). Arnie Cunningham is the male loser of Libertyville High in Christine and in Carrie, Carrie White is his female equivalent, the female loser of Ewen Consolidated High School. Carrie’s coming of age struggles are doubled, in that she must strive to define herself and claim her identity on dual fronts: first at home, where she fights to free herself from her mother’s domineering control, and again in the high school halls, where she tries to fit in and find a place in the high school pecking order where she can be, if not accepted, at least relatively safe from targeted bullying and abuse. This is a powerful and volatile combination, where Carrie faces pain, exclusion, and suffering from all sides; as Sears writes,Carrie “explores the world of American youth, analyzing religious extremism, bullying and suffering, humiliation and revenge, and conflicts between the individual, the social group, and the family” (28). Finally, her coming of age is physical as well as social, with Carrie’s powers emerging with the onset of her first period,4 the biological and often cultural point of demarcation between girlhood COMING OF AGE STORIES 113 and womanhood. Faced with this coming of age, King’s Carrie—and the subsequent film adaptations by Brian DePalma and Kimberly Peirce— “[trace] the development of femininity to its nearly successful conclusion” (Lindsey 280). This makes Carrie one of the most complex and contested of King’s coming of age stories: Carrie successfully claims her power and the identity that it affords her, but this self-actualization ultimately destroys her.5 Carrie’s power rises to the forefront with the coming of her first period, with Carrie’s—albeit delayed—puberty reawakening a long latent talent. Just as Carrie’s telekinetic abilities are initially strange to her, her developing woman’s body is a mystery as well. Margaret White’s influence tempers not only who Carrie, her daughter, could be, but the girl she understands herself to be, physically and biologically, as well. When Carrie gets her first period in the high school locker room in the novel’s opening scene, Carrie has no idea what is happening to her and panics, thinking she is bleeding to death. When Carrie asks her mother why she hadn’t told Carrie about menstruation, instead leaving her to be terrified, ridiculed, and alone, Margaret blames Carrie’s own sin. Turning to prayer as she simultaneously berates Carrie and attempts to force the girl into her prayer closet, Marga- ret White calls upon God to “help this sinning woman beside me here see the sin of her days and her ways. Show her that if she had remained sinless the Curse of Blood would never have come on her” (Carrie 65). Margaret has a similar explanation for breasts, telling her daughter that only bad, sinful girls develop them (Carrie 35). As a result, the physical aspect of Carrie’s coming of age—as her body transforms from that of a girl into that of a woman—is overshadowed by guilt and terror. In her quest for her own identity, Carrie’s first challenge—and one that she overcomes only temporarily and incompletely—is to separate herself from her mother and resist her mother’s fundamentalist religious mania. This volatile mother-daughter relationship circumscribes Carrie’s understanding of the world around her, which Margaret White dismisses almost unequivocally as full of sin. Carrie’s life and identity seem to her one of untapped possibility bound only by the prison of her mother’s maniacal love, and she considers that

She could, she knew she could be

(what)

in another place. She was thick through the waist only because sometimes she felt so miserable, empty, bored, that the only way to fill that gaping, whis- tling hole was to eat and eat and eat—but she was not that thick through the middle . . . She could fix her hair. Buy pantyhose and blue and green tights. 114 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

Make little skirts and dresses from Butterick and Simplicity patterns. The price of a bus ticket, a train ticket. She could be, could be, could be—

Alive. (Carrie 48, emphasis original)

However, none of these potential realities are possible within her mother’s house. The temptation of the wider world and the potential for beauty and freedom that could come with it are sin, false promises that must be turned from and denied, in favor of Margaret’s fanatical brand of Christianity, with its emphasis on punishment, repentance, abjection, and pain. Outside of her home, Carrie’s quest for belonging among her peers is familiar, one that remains just as relevant for contemporary adolescents and teenagers as when King wrote his novel more than forty years ago. Magistrale argues in his essay “Inherited Haunts: Stephen King’s Terrible Children” that “One of King’s greatest fortes remains his ability to render the most perverse and grotesque aspects of the American high school experience with unflinching accuracy” (61). The harsh reality of high school cliques and both overt and covert bullying are central to Carrie and Car- rie’s fraught—and ultimately unsuccessful—negotiation of her place among her peers. Carrie has been the outsider, the perennially bullied Other, from earliest childhood. Carrie struggles to fit in, to be more like her classmates and earn their acceptance; however, “While trying to discover her identity, Carrie’s view of herself is continuously distorted by the ways in which her immediate associates react to her” (Davis 144). Carrie can transform herself in any number of ways, attempting to masquerade as a “normal” teenage girl, but the high school hierarchy has her defined, a role and identity that she is locked into, however little she wants it and however dili- gently she works to jettison it. Carrie’s classmates are “intent on dictating to Carrie exactly how she view herself” (ibid.) and from this perspective, Carrie will never belong or be accepted; she will always be excluded, the “freak,” the “loser.” This long line of ostracism and cruelty reaches a climax in the locker room, as the other girls pelt Carrie with tampons and sanitary pads. The culmination of more than a decade of bullying, in this moment “critical mass was reached. The ultimate shit-on, gross-out, put-down, long searched for, was found. Frisson” (Carrie 10). While some of the girls in the locker room “would later claim surprise” (ibid.) at what happened, at the groupthink way in which they turned upon Carrie, it is really no surprise at all, for either them or for Carrie herself. This is simply the next step, the accumulation of thousands of smaller abuses that have punctuated and established their treatment of Carrie since childhood, a spark set to the kindling of a lifetime of bullying, and one which will eventually rage completely out of control.6 COMING OF AGE STORIES 115

Despite Carrie’s well-established outsider status, Tommy Ross’s prom invitation gives Carrie the chance to be someone new, to forget all of the taunts and insults and be seen differently, finally a peer among her classmates rather than the butt of all their jokes. The femalebildungsroman is often distinguished from its more traditional male counterpart by the central feature of a romantic love relationship and while Tommy and Carrie have no romantic history together, their date to the prom opens up a world of possibilities for Carrie and awakens her to the chance for love and passion. Tommy asks Carrie to the prom out of his devotion to his girlfriend Sue, though this triangle is complicated as Tommy begins to admire Carrie, enjoying their time together rather than seeing it as a chore to be completed and then quickly forgotten. Her position as Tommy’s date and the inclusion it affords her, as well as Carrie’s own rapidly developing sense of herself, make their evening together a catalyst for Carrie’s self-discovery and transformation from an outcast girl into a beautiful, powerful young woman. Tommy’s popularity—and by extension, Sue’s social position, sacrificed as penance for her part in the locker room abuse—have the potential to achieve something Car- rie never could on her own and elevate her from the depths of social exclusion. As part of Carrie’s bildungsroman, this social rite of passage has the potential to transform her. Carrie very carefully orchestrates this new stage in her life. After overcoming her initial fear and suspicion, Carrie is cau- tiously hopeful that things could finally change for her, and spends a good deal of time and energy crafting the person she would like to become. Carrie sews herself a beautiful red dress, one that highlights her new womanliness, emphasizing her breasts and her slim waist: “She had bought a special bras- siere to go with it, which gave her breasts the proper uplift (not that they actually needed it) but left their top halves uncovered. Wearing it gave her a weird, dreamy feeling that was half shame and half defiant excitement” (Carrie 141). In the midst of this self-actualization and sexual awakening, Carrie stands in her gown, waiting for Tommy and perched on the brink of a world of possibilities and when she opens the door to him, she also opens the world to herself; as Tommy silently looks at her, Carrie “felt— actually, physically—her whole miserable life narrow to a point that might be an end or the beginning of a widening beam” (Carrie 150). Having gotten a glimpse of this potential new life, Carrie’s behavior changes as well; while she is still fearful and on the lookout for some cruel prank, she is also happier, more outgoing, and ready to fight to hold onto this new self. As she tells her mother, “I just want you to understand that things are going to change around here, Momma . . . They better understand it too” (Carrie 115, emphasis original). 116 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

Several critics, including Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, have compared Carrie to a modern day Cinderella, who instead of getting her “happily ever after” is pushed past the limits of endurance, to the point of fiery vengeance. Mir- cea Eliade, in “Myths and Fairy Tales” argues that while on the surface, the fairy tale “presents the structure of an infinitely serious and responsible adventure . . . in the last analysis it is reducible to an initiatory scenario” (201). From this perspective, fairy tales are more than just an entertaining diversion; rather, they are a sort of dress rehearsal for the adolescent coming of age, stories told to children that teach them how to be adults within their cultures and communities through the codification of that culture’s mores and values. From this critical perspective, Cinderella communicates ideal gender roles, specifically that the meek and long-suffering girl will eventually be rewarded for her patience, perseverance, and significantly, her silence. Cinderella endures the abuse of her stepmother and stepsisters without complaint and is blessed with a magical escape from her life of drudgery and mistreatment. As Yarbro explains in her essay “Cinderella’s Revenge: Twists on Fairy Tale and Mythic Themes in the Work of Stephen King,” much of Carrie’s story follows the same narrative trajectory as Cin- derella’s: overlooked and abused, a plain girl has the chance to show her true self, beautiful and desired as she dances with her Prince Charming at the ball. Yarbro equates Margaret White with Cinderella’s stepmother and as Carrie’s classmates “mock her for her manner and appearance, their derision [is] not unlike the Step-sisters” (6), as they collectively fill that narrative position. With the idealized “happily ever afters” of countless Dis- ney versions, it can be easy to lose sight of the brutality of traditional fairy tales, though Yarbro reminds readers that “In one of the original versions of Cinderella, when she is given the chance to be revenged upon her family, she has their noses and hands cut off” (ibid.). The culmination of Carrie’s fairy tale, cut short by the bucket of blood Chris dumps on Carrie at the evening’s crowning moment, echoes the violence of these early fairy tales and Carrie rises above her tormentors to wreak her vengeance. As Yarbro writes, Carrie “wrecks the entire town in a display of psychokinesis that smacks of Jovian rage” (ibid.). While the traditional Cinderella’s reprieve comes in the form of a magical fairy godmother, Carrie sets herself free, through the paranormal power of her telekinesis, which, like Cinderella’s magic, sets her apart from her peers. In the end, it is this combination of multiple abuses coupled with Carrie’s telekinetic abilities that results in Carrie’s climactic prom night massacre. The path from childhood to adulthood is fraught with conflict and is often overwhelming, terrifying, and even potentially traumatic. Winter argues that this “journey, the coming of age, is an important underpinning of all of King’s novels, and in Carrie, we see glimpses of the true danger that COMING OF AGE STORIES 117

King perceives along its path” (32). Carrie is pushed too far, by both her mother and her peers, and responds to this pain through the only means available to her, turning her suffering outward and focusing her wrath upon her tormentors. Like Carrie, the boys of The Body and Todd in Apt Pupil also encounter some of these “true dangers” along the path to adulthood. While Gordie successfully navigates this passage, his friends are not so lucky, with Vern, Teddy, and Chris’s possibilities cut short, to greater or lesser degrees, by their family histories and the limited range of expectations with which they are faced. Finally, Todd’s childhood innocence is left far behind in the wake of his growing obsession and manipulation of Dussander, with his dark fantasies subsuming all other aspects of his identity, corrupting him beyond the point of salvation. Section III

Playing with Publishing 9

Serial Publishing and The Green Mile

ing’s reputation as a prolific and best-selling author has been cemented Kfor several decades, with his dozens of novels and collections establishing him as a clear publishing phenomenon. However, in recent years King has moved beyond traditional publishing to experiment with both old and new approaches, including serial publication, ebooks, and graphic novels. This type of experimentation can be a risky move for authors and publishers alike. As Neil Shoebridge argues in “New Chapter for an Old Publishing Idea,” “Book publishers are not noted for their marketing skills . . . Examples of innovative marketing strategies in the book business are rare” (72). However, King has long embraced new approaches to storytelling and publishing, with great success. One of the earliest—and highest-profile—of these forays into experimental publishing was King’s decision to publish The Green Mile serially in 1996. Set in a Depression-era Southern prison’s death row, the first installment, titled The Two Dead Girls was released in March of 1996, with one installment a month published through the final installment, Coffey on the Mile, which was released in August of the same year. Serial publishing is a historical phenomenon and beginning in the Vic- torian era, “From the moment that the industrialization of print production offered a mass readership access to cheap, printed work, serialization emerged as a prominent publication practice” (Allen and van den Berg 4). Charles Dickens is often considered the best-known of the serial publishers. As Joel J. Brattin, the honorary curator of the Fellman Dickens Col- lection, explains “Every one of Charles Dickens’s novels was published serially—that is, the novels appeared not all at once, but in parts or installments, over a space of time” (Brattin). Dickens embraced serial publishing for several reasons, both economic and authorial. In terms of affordability, 122 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

“Publishing his novels in serial form expanded Dickens’s readership, as more people could afford to buy fiction on the installment plan,” while Dickens also favored this serial publication approach because he “enjoyed the intimacy with his audience that serialization provided” (Brattin), giving him the opportunity to consider reader responses to the stories in progress as he moved forward into future sections. Several other now- classics were also originally published in serial format, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (Lee and Love). In twentieth-century mass publication, serialization was a staple of the weekly Saturday Evening Post, through which King himself experienced it as a boy. As he recalls in the foreword to The Green Mile’s first installment, The Two Dead Girls,

I have always loved stories told in episodes. It is a format I first encountered in The Saturday Evening Post, and I liked it because the end of each episode made the reader an almost equal participant with the writer—you had a whole week to try to figure out the next twist of the snake. Also, one read and experienced these stories more intensely, it seemed to me, because they were rationed. You couldn’t gulp, even if you wanted to (and if the story was good, you did). (ix, emphasis original)

Serial fiction has been much less common in contemporary publishing, with some notable exceptions. For example, as Shoebridge writes, “the 1988 book The Bonfire of the Vanities by the American author Tom Wolfe was serialised in Rolling Stone magazine, and the American writer Michael McDowell released a book called Blackwater in installments” (73),1 the latter of which focuses on a Southern family, some of whom are shape- shifting were-alligators. The main defining characteristic of the serial novel, inherent in the name itself, is that it is published in several chronologically spaced out individual installments rather than all at once. The time between installments can vary, with an average time frame being somewhere between a week and a month from one installment to the next. In terms of narrative style, serial novels also must have an “overarching narrative, unresolved until the end” (Lee and Love), including key themes that are developed over multiple installments, as well as cliffhangers at the end of each installment, with the exception of the concluding segment. Given these unique demands, the narrative structure of the serial novel differs from that of the SERIAL PUBLISHING AND THE GREEN MILE 123 traditional novel, with the serial novel including multiple narrative cliffhangers, rather than just one central conflict, and often some revisiting of earlier material at the beginning of installments to remind readers of where the story last left off or to draw in new readers who have not read the previous installments. While Victorian audiences eagerly awaited the next installment of their favorite serial—with works such as Dickens’s Great Expectations and David Copperfield parceled out over several years rather than a matter of weeks or months—when King decided to publish The Green Mile serially, it remained to be seen whether contemporary readers, accustomed to instant gratification, would deem the installments worth the wait. Gabrielle Coyne, the Australian marketing manager for Penguin, which published The Green Mile, explained, “Serialising a book is a fantastic idea, but as King says, it is something of a high-wire act. People must be persuaded to wait a month for the next chapter. There is a risk that some consumers will not come back for more” (qtd. in Shoebridge 73). Thom Geier echoes this sentiment, writing that “In adopting a Dickensian serial form to tell a Depression-era tale of death row, Stephen King took a risk” (31). However, it was a risk that paid off handsomely for both King and his publishers. As the series drew to a close with the sixth and final installment, all six installments simultaneously held a place on that week’s New York Times paperback bestseller list (Geier 31). Advertising Age’s Nancy Webster summed up the financial results of The Green Mile’s serial publication: “When the fast-paced cam- paign was over, 23 million copies had been sold at $2.99 each—including 250,000 $18 boxed sets of the six part thriller” (s14), making The Green Mile an overwhelming financial success. The Green Mile was also critically successful, with reviewer Tom De Haven calling the first installment, The Two Dead Girls, King’s “best fiction in years” (“A Killer Serial” 63). Much of this positive response from fans and critics was not in spite of the unique publication approach but rather a direct result of it. As De Haven wrote after the first installment, “Is Coffey innocent? I don’t know . . . Is this going to turn into a gore story or a ghost story? Or both? I don’t know that either. In fact, all I do know for sure at this point is that I’m hooked, and hooked good” (ibid.). Kris- tine Kathryn Rusch of Fantasy & Science Fiction reflected on her reading experience after the conclusion of The Green Mile. She picked up the first installment and after finishing it “I found that I couldn’t shake the story during that month . . . and I felt a deep frustration at my inability to finish the book on my schedule” (4). At the publication of the second installment, The Mouse on the Mile, Rusch says “I read that section within two hours, and was alternately frustrated and pleased that I was enjoying the series so much” (ibid.). Serial fiction and the enforced suspense between 124 TEACHING STEPHEN KING installments was relatively unfamiliar to contemporary readers, though The Green Mile’s unique publication format presented them with a new and exhilarating reading experience, one that many readers enjoyed. As Rusch looks beyond her own personal experience and reader response, she writes “I’ve spoken with other readers who’ve had the same experience, and we all agree that part of the joy of the series was the loss of control, the forced savoring of the novel, the willingness to read at someone else’s pace. Had The Green Mile been bad or even mediocre, the experiment would have failed. Because it was good, it worked beyond all expectations” (ibid.). The unique narrative structure of The Green Mile was a significant contributing factor in getting readers to return for each new installment. Given the episodic nature of serial publication, each segment must leave the reader wanting more and motivate them enough to go buy the next month’s installment, providing readers with a cliffhanger at each installment’s conclusion. At the other end of this process, with the start of each new installment, it is often necessary to provide readers with a recap of the ongoing narrative and the previous installment’s conclusion, which can serve to refresh the minds of readers and pull them back into the story or even to give new readers the background information they need to begin reading mid-series. Both of these stylistic approaches are characteristic of The Green Mile’s serial publication. The first installment, The Two Dead Girls, ended on an ominous, rather than action-based, cliffhanger, highlighting themes that would be central to the rest of the novel as a whole, including the morality of capital punishment and the transformation of narrator Paul Edgecombe through his relationship with inmate John Cof- fey. As the first segment draws to a close, Paul gives readers a bit of a flash forward, to the Green Mile following Coffey’s execution. As he considers, “Never had I been in a place that felt so nakedly haunted, and it was right then . . . that my head began to know what my heart had understood ever since John Coffey had walked the Green Mile: I couldn’t do this job much longer. Depression or no Depression, I couldn’t watch many more men walk through my office to their deaths. Even one more might be too many” (Two Dead Girls 90–91). While this is one of the serial novel’s more philosophical cliffhangers, it serves several purposes as the reader begins to immerse themselves in the story: we know from the very first installment that Coffey will not receive a last minute reprieve, that Paul is a different man after knowing Coffey than he was before, and that after presiding over the executions of several men—78, to be exact, as he tells us in the opening pages of the novel (Two Dead Girls 17)—it is a job he cannot do any longer, a fundamental change for which his relationship with Coffey is also responsible. With this cryptic conclusion to the initial installment, King roughly sketches some of the parameters of the larger story to come, SERIAL PUBLISHING AND THE GREEN MILE 125 creating suspense surrounding characterization rather than narrative action. Later installments feature more traditional, action-based cliffhangers: new prisoner “Wild Bill” Wharton takes a guard hostage at the end of the second segment, The Mouse on the Mile; sadistic guard Percy Whet- more kills the mouse Mr. Jingles at the end of the third installment, Coffey’s Hands; and Paul and his men perch of the cusp of a potentially career- ending risk at the end of the fourth installment, The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix. Each of these life and death moments left readers in suspense for the month until the next installment’s release, when they would be pulled back into the story at that exact same narrative moment. The cliffhangers and the imposed delayed gratification shaped the experiences of readers as well: they couldn’t keep reading and they couldn’t peek ahead to the end to see what was going to happen, no matter how much they might want to. Finally, these cliffhangers foregrounded King’s unique writing approach, as King was still writing the later installments as readers devoured the early segments. As King wrote in the foreword included in The Two Dead Girls, “Until the final episode arrives in bookstores, no one is going to know how The Green Mile turns out . . . and that may include me” (xi). While the second installment was on sale, the fourth segment was partially written; as King told an interviewer, “The rest is somewhere in my brain . . . Some of the other books I’ve written, I haven’t really known where I was going, either, but it’s dangerous. It’s like taking off in an airplane and not knowing if the landing gear works” (qtd. in Kennedy 60).2 Reengaging readers with the ongoing narrative is another unique stylistic hallmark of serial fiction and one that King accomplished in a couple of different ways. First, King often includes direct repetition between the end of one segment and the beginning of the next, with the reprinting of a few paragraphs from the previous installment’s conclusion, reestablishing the earlier segment’s final moments before moving forward. In addition, our narrator Paul is telling the story of the Green Mile decades after it happened, as an elderly man, remembering and writing about the past. Given this perspective, Paul himself ushers readers back into the story once more, reflecting on what he has written and what he still has to tell as he sits down to continue his writing, serving as a guide between the present and the past, bridging the gap between the preceding installment and this new one. Paul’s perspective as an old man writing the story of his younger self also affords King the opportunity to feature several thematic doublings, dynamically connecting the past and the present for both Paul and the reader. For example, Paul’s life, both then and now, takes place within a prescriptive organizational structure, first at Cold Mountain Penitentiary and later at Georgia Pines nursing home. In both instances, his days are controlled and well-ordered, characterized by routine rather 126 TEACHING STEPHEN KING than spontaneity; however, while in his days on the Green Mile he was the man who established the structure, at Georgia Pines he finds it imposed upon him by others, including the kitchen staff who cook his meals and the orderlies who oversee his care. Another of these doublings between past and present is that of abused power and arbitrary cruelty, with Percy Whetmore’s blustering mistreatment of the Green Mile’s prisoners echoed in Georgia Pines orderly Brad Dolan, who intimidates Paul both physically and psychologically, constantly reminding Paul of his relatively powerless position. Paul reflects of capital punishment that while the electric chair can kill a man with relative ease, it can never destroy the evil which lies within him and in much the same way, the evil that lies within such power- hungry tyrants as Whetmore and Dolan is a universal constant, inescapable and cruel, one that continues to inflict pain and suffering on those who cannot protect themselves. These themes resonate across the years of Paul’s life, connecting the past and the present, as well as acting as a con- duit for Paul’s memories and for readers as they navigate from one serial installment to the next, bringing them back into Paul’s perspective and, through that perspective, once more into the past and the story at the heart of The Green Mile. The Green Mile was later published as a single volume, satisfying the desires of readers who wanted to read it at their own—likely accelerated— pace, though as Rusch argues, “I feel sad for those of you who waited to read the book all at once. You’ve missed something” (4).

Themes inThe Green Mile

While the serial structure of the The Green Mile is narratively unique, the novel as a whole has several larger themes that are developed over the course of all six installments. The Green Mile combines the prison setting and reality-based horror of King’s novella Rita Hayworth and the Shaw- shank Redemption (in the collection Different Seasons) with supernatural thrills and overarching, interconnected themes of capital punishment, race, and tropes of Christianity. Capital punishment is a perennially controversial topic: is state- sanctioned execution morally right? If so, what crimes are punishable by death? In what manner should that execution be carried out? Are our criminal justice and judicial systems reliable enough that executions can be per- formed without the lingering questions or possibilities that innocent people may be sent to their deaths? These questions have been central to the death penalty debate since its inception and continue to be key concerns in the ongoing discussion. The Green Mile is set in 1932, a historical moment when capital punishment was an especially resonant issue. As Sean O’Sullivan SERIAL PUBLISHING AND THE GREEN MILE 127 explains, “executions in the US reached an all-time high in the 1930s with 199 executions carried out in 1935” (486), a reality which situates The Green Mile and its condemned men squarely within that historical moment. In The Green Mile, the eponymous lime linoleum-tiled stretch of hallway runs straight through Cold Mountain Penitentiary’s death row, dictating the final steps of prisoners sentenced to die in the electric chair, with capital punishment an omnipresent reality for both prisoners and guards alike. In the first installment ofThe Green Mile, Paul refers to both the number of men that he executed while at Cold Mountain—78—and the way in which those executions weigh upon him: “that’s one figure I’ve never been confused about; I’ll remember it on my deathbed” (Two Dead Girls 17). While Paul has few moral qualms about his work—with the exception of John Cof- fey, of course—it is not a burden he carries lightly. Following the execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, the first depicted in The Green Mile, there is a decidedly anticlimactic moment, when Paul says, “It was over. We had once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create” (Mouse on the Mile 44). In addition to this individual death, Paul also questions the efficacy of execution. Considering another prisoner condemned to die, Eduard Delacroix, the heinous nature of Delacroix’s crimes is undeniable: after raping and murdering a young woman, he set fire to the body, which caught a nearby apartment and killed six people, including two children (Two Dead Girls 29–30). Delacroix has been sentenced to death and Paul will do his duty. But while Delacroix

would sit down with Old Sparky in a little while, and Old Sparky would make an end to him . . . whatever it was that had done that awful thing was already gone . . . In a way, that was the worst; Old Sparky never burned what was inside them, and the drugs they inject them with today don’t put it to sleep. It vacates, jumps to someone else, and leaves us to kill husks that aren’t really alive anyway. (Two Dead Girls 30)

Paul occupies an unique position: it is his responsibility—along with his fellow guards—to execute the prisoners in his care, after having come to know many of them as both men and monsters, and while he believes in the moral rightness of this duty, he is also troubled by the affront against humanity and the ultimate uselessness of these executions. Just as the 1930s were a statistically high point for executions, capital punishment was a common topic of debate at the time of King’s writing in the mid-1990s. As O’Sullivan explains, The Green Mile, its film adaptation, and the larger “1990s cycle of death penalty movies, and the debate that accompanied them, emerged at a time when support for the continued use of capital punishment in America was running at an all-time high. Public 128 TEACHING STEPHEN KING belief in the appropriateness of capital punishment in cases of murder stood at 80% in 1994” (486) and “The number of executions carried out reached a post-1976 high with 98 executions carried out in 1999” (487).3 Given the larger sociocultural context, The Green Mile positions readers— and with the critically acclaimed film adaptation, viewers—in the thick of this debate, considering the morality and efficacy of execution right alongside narrator Paul Edgecombe, with all of the personal and ethical implications his negotiation carries, as well as the complicity this implies, echoed through those who come to witness executions at Cold Mountain, Paul’s own considerations, and the readers’ position in bearing witness to humanity and destruction on the Green Mile. The most explicit consideration of the horrors of execution comes in the aptly named fourth segment, The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix, where the cruel and incompetent Percy Whetmore fails to wet the head sponge, which results in a prolonged, torturous, and exceedingly inhumane death for Delacroix. Without the sponge to efficiently conduct the electrical current, Delacroix is basically cooked alive, with his body bursting into flames before he dies: “it was at least two minutes before it was over, the longest two minutes of my whole life, and through most of it I think Delacroix was conscious” (Bad Death 54). King’s description of Delacroix’s execution is detailed and unrelenting, refusing to turn away from the horror of Dela- croix’s death, the torture Whetmore exacts, and the horrifying destruction of Delacroix’s body as he catches on fire and his flesh sloughs offBad ( Death 57). Whetmore intended to make Delacroix suffer and in this, he succeeds beyond his wildest expectations, though he is not the only one who bears witness and Paul and his fellow guards must shoulder the burden of complicity. In addition to the guards who must oversee and deal with the aftermath of Delacroix’s execution, there are also those who have shown up to witness it, believing in the moral rightness of his death, though they literally turn away in horror at its reality, “heading for the door like cattle in a stampede” (Bad Death 54). In the moments following Delacroix’s long and violent death, Paul hears one of the witnesses at his back scream “‘Oh my God! . . . Is it always this way? Why didn’t somebody tell me? I never would have come!’ . . . Too late now, friend, I thought” (Bad Death 57, emphasis original). The witnesses have come to see justice done but instead been horrified at its reality. Delacroix’s death is admittedly far more gruesome than most, though Paul witnesses this same doubt and rejection at other executions as well. Following the comparatively unremarkable execution of Bitterbuck, Paul says of the audience members that “most sat with their heads down, looking at the floor, as if stunned. Or ashamed” Mouse( on the Mile 44). Finally, when Coffey begs Paul not to put a hood on him prior to SERIAL PUBLISHING AND THE GREEN MILE 129 his execution, Paul grants Coffey’s final wish, much to the chagrin of some of the witnesses who have turned up to watch Coffey die. However, “The mask was tradition, not law. It was, in fact, to spare the witnesses. And suddenly I decided that they did not need to be spared, not this once” (Coffey on the Mile 106). They have come to see and with Coffey in the chair, Paul decides that they will; the witnesses must face the reality of the sentence, however it may affect them. Though each of these executions differ, both the guards and the witnesses are held culpable, complicit in the presence of death. With Coffey’s execution, Paul does his duty, though for the first time he does so in the full knowledge that it is wrong, that he is killing an innocent man. While he has faced uncertainly and even downright horror in the previous 77 executions over which he has presided, none have been as clearly wrong as when he has to kill Coffey and it is this final affront— against Paul’s relatively steadfast belief in the power of good over evil, as well as his very humanity—that is the final straw for him. As he tells readers at the end of The Green Mile’s opening segment, of himself and fellow guard Brutus Howell, “Neither of us ever took part in another execution. John Coffey was the last” (Two Dead Girls 92). Part foreshadowing and part character-driven cliffhanger, readers know Paul will be transformed by what he sees and experiences, as the representations of capital punishment to come may well transform their own perspectives as well, situated in the midst of the 1990s capital punishment conversation. Another key theme—and one that cannot be entirely separated from that of crime and punishment—is race, including criticism of Coffey within the trope of the “Magical Negro.”4 As Brian Kent explains in “Chris- tian Martyr or Grateful Slave? The Magical Negro as Uncle Tom in Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile,” the “Uncle Tom” figure is “ubiquitous throughout the history of cinema—that of the saintly, self-sacrificing black man whose primary concern in his life is the well-being of his white masters, even when that concern translates into suffering for Tom himself, for his family, or for African Americans in general” (115). Kent goes on to explain that the “Magical Negro” often helps these white masters through supernatural means, though “the saintly black with supernatural powers . . . uses these powers exclusively for the benefit of white people, often white people who are complete strangers,” and despite these prodigious powers, these black characters are often depicted as narratively peripheral, “operat[ing] as a secondary character in films that foreground the concerns and behavior of their primary white characters” (116). Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu outlines five key characteristics of the “Magical Negro”:

1. He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters. 130 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

2. He or she seems to have nothing better to do than to help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first. 3. He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist. 4. He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above. 5. He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch . . . He or she often literally has magical powers.

While the “Magical Negro” is almost an invariably “good” and heroic character, possessing powers that his or her white counterparts lack, this power is used exclusively for the benefit of the white protagonist, denying the “Magical Negro” agency and self-determination. The Green Mile’s John Coffey fulfills each of Okorafor-Mbachu’s defining characteristics for “The Magical Negro.” While Paul remarks early in the novel that the Green Mile houses condemned prisoners of all races and genders—“at Cold Mountain there was no segregation among the walking dead” (Two Dead Girls 18)—John Coffey is the only black man there during the time about which Paul is writing. The only other non-white character is Arlen Bitterbuck, a Native American death row inmate, who is executed in the serial novel’s second installment. The warden, guards, and Coffey’s fellow prisoners are all white; so are the law enforcement officials who arrested Coffey, the journalist who covered the trial, and of course, the two little girls Coffey is accused of raping and murdering. As Cerise L. Glenn and Landra J. Cunningham argue in “The Power of Black Magic: The Magical Negro and White Salvation in Film,” Coffey’s “actions are directed primarily toward the interests of Paul Edgecombe, the lead White character. After Coffey cures Edgecombe from an ailment, he uses his gifts again under Edgecombe’s direction” (142), to help his fellow prisoners and to cure the warden’s wife, Melinda Moores, of a brain tumor which would otherwise kill her. Coffey drops unexpected into Paul’s life and when Coffey is executed, he leaves Paul a changed man, transformed by their relationship. Coffey is uneducated, only capable of reading and writing his own name, which, he colloquially explains, is “like the drink, only not spelled the same way” (Two Dead Girls 31). Finally, Coffey has the spiritual strength of a martyr and the magical powers of a healer, allowing him to take the pain and hurt of others into himself, alleviating their suffering through his own. In his relationships with white characters, the “Magical Negro” is almost always sacrificial, often demonstrating a lack of “any personal life or defining characteristics” (Mendez). He drops into the white protagonist’s life with little known history or backstory and usually drops out of it again, with SERIAL PUBLISHING AND THE GREEN MILE 131 little fanfare and disappearing without a trace. Next to nothing is known about John Coffey before he is found holding the bodies of the two dead Detterick girls. There is almost no information about where Coffey was before, where his home is, or where he came from (Coffey’s Hands 43–44) and though he bears many scars, he tells Melinda Moores, “I don’t hardly remember where they all come from, ma’am” (Night Journey 75). Coffey can’t even recall where he got the lunch that was found in his pocket the day he was discovered with the Detterick girls’ bodies (Two Dead Girls 57). He “has no ties other than to the White people he helps . . . no history or relatives” (Glenn and Cunningham 145). He shows up on the Green Mile and in Paul’s life almost history-less, with the exception of the girls’ murder and the ensuing trial. Coffey exits Paul’s life just as quickly, with his execution, though in the tradition of the “Magical Negro,” readers’ concerns lie not necessarily with Coffey’s death itself but rather with its impact on Paul. In fact, as Coffey prepares to go to the electric chair, he comforts Paul: “I want to go, boss . . . I’m rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss . . . I’m tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I’m tired of all the times I’ve wanted to help and couldn’t. I’m tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it’s the pain. There’s too much. If I could end it, I would. But I cain’t” (Coffey on the Mile 81–82). In this exchange, Matthew W. Hughey argues that “Coffey is transformed into the classic ‘white Man’s Burden’ in which Edgecomb[e]’s benevolent paternalism is able to free (murder) Coffey and then release (condemn) Coffey to the death penalty” (564). While Coffey’s death is tragic, he goes to it willingly and even a bit gratefully, shifting the narrative focus back to Paul, his transformation, and how he has been changed by his relationship with John Coffey. The theme of race and the “Magic Negro” are inextricable from the earlier theme of capital punishment, and Coffey’s self-sacrifice at the novel’s conclusion is a point of frequent contention. As Hughey argues, Coffey’s execution “neither frames the death scene as a spectacle of an innocent man being executed, nor does it suggest problems with the U.S. legal system that regularly executes innocent people (with a historically much higher rate for African Americans than whites)” (563–564). However, this troubling connection between race and execution is one of the reasons King gives for writing John Coffey as a black man. Responding to Spike Lee’s charges of Coffey as a “super Negro” (qtd. in Magistrale, Hollywood’s 13), King says “It’s complete bullshit. Coffey was black for one reason only: it was the one sure thing about his character that was going to make certain that he was going to burn. That was the situation I was trying to set up. It was completely plot driven and had nothing to do with black and white” (ibid.). While Coffey embodies many of the characteristics of the traditional “Magical Negro,” The Green Mile also raises questions about the 132 TEACHING STEPHEN KING racial prejudices of the criminal justice system, including the fact that Cof- fey’s lawyer never comes to see him after he is imprisoned and there is no possibility presented for an appeal. Coffey has been judged not only by a court of law but also in the court of public opinion where, largely because of his race and his size, he is deemed monstrous, guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. Coffey’s position as a “Magical Negro” within this context is “particularly unnerving . . . [because] the concerns and condition of African American communities from which these magical Negroes emerge are set aside in favor of exercising supernatural powers on behalf of the white characters who represent the very social and political structure that oppresses them” (Kent 117). As Magistrale explains, “Coffey is assumed to be guilty from the moment he is found holding the dead girls” (Hollywood’s 140). Cradling the Detterick twins’ bodies, he is mourning his inability to heal them, to bring them back to life, when he tells the arriving posse that “I tried to take it back, but it was too late” (Two Dead Girls 35). Seen through the lens of racism, prejudice, and hatred, Coffey’s words sign his own death warrant, read as a confession by those rabid with grief and vigilantism desperate for someone to blame.5 A final key theme—once again intertwined with the earlier ones of capital punishment and race—is John Coffey’s position as a sacrificial Christ figure, with the two men even sharing the same initials. As Okorafor- Mbachu argues, “When you have a character sacrificing himself or herself for another character, this is not, in and of itself, bad. In religious texts, sacrifice is most often treated as an act that makes one godly,” a trend seen across religious and spiritual traditions from Jesus to the Buddha Gautama and Krishna (Okorafor-Mbachu). These sacrificial characters come to help others, to bring them enlightenment and salvation. Like Jesus, John Cof- fey acts for the good of others, performs healing miracles, and ultimately, gives his life. Paul F. M. Zahl argues that with The Green Mile, “King has written an imaginative and dense parable of the triumph of sacrificial love over wickedness and false accusation,” rich with Christian themes including “subsitutionary atonement, the cross of Golgotha, and the unanswer- able sovereignty of God” (82). Paul even finds himself in a crisis of faith as Coffey’s execution nears, imagining himself akin to Jesus’ executioners; as Brutus Howell asks him, “we’re fixing to kill a gift of God . . . What am I going to say if I end up standing in front of God the Father Almighty and he asks me to explain why I did it? That it was my job?” (Coffey on the Mile 78).6 However, combined with the interconnected themes of capital punishment and race, Okorafor-Mbachu argues that the sacrifice made by Coffey carries a different weight and significance, since “self-sacrificing ‘characters’ come in on a pedestal. Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna are usually the center of the plot. The fact of who they are makes their sacrifices SERIAL PUBLISHING AND THE GREEN MILE 133 meaningful. The same cannot be said about the Magical Negro. The Magi- cal Negro is expendable because he or she isn’t anyone special.” As Kim D. Hester-Williams argues, this appeals to an underlying racial discord in many viewers and expiates any guilt they may feel about Coffey’s unjust execution, since “Elevating Coffey to the divine status of Savior allows the spectator to dismiss his suffering, especially since he suffers for the ‘good’ of others; he saves those who can be saved. They are not, presumably, as he is, economically or socially dispensable” (emphasis original). Considered separately or in their interconnections—and particularly in light of recent high-profile cases of violence against African American men—the themes of capital punishment, race, and sacrifice provide for an insightful critical consideration of The Green Mile, as well as its continued resonance in contemporary American culture.

Twenty-First Century Serialization

Serial publication is often viewed as a remnant of the publishing past, well evidenced by the Dickensian allusions that informed many responses to and reviews of The Green Mile at the time of its publication. However, serialization has experienced resurgent popularity in the early twenty- first century and this technique is alive and well in publishing and other contemporary media, from film and television to graphic novels, video games, and podcasts.7 As Plympton’s 8 Jennifer 8 Lee and Yael Goldstein Love explain in their “Short History of Serial Fiction,” “serials are compul- sively appealing . . . So much so that every new medium for the past two centuries has used them to establish its audience,” with the format expanding beyond literature to encompass film, radio, and television as well. Indi- vidual television episodes often end with an unresolved narrative to keep viewers tuning in week after week, while the cliffhanger is a hallmark of season finales for ongoing series in just about every genre of television. On the big screen, the growing trend of book to film adaptations being released as multiple movies has also capitalized upon this serial narrative approach, using a cliffhanger to draw faithful fans back the following year for the next installment. This is an approach that has worked especially well with fantasy adaptations, including the final installments of popular Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games series, each of which were released as two films, and the three-film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings prequel, The Hobbit, which was adapted by Peter Jackson and released as three separate films from 2012 to 2014. Serialization has also been making its mark in other media formats as well. One recent example of this is the immensely popular podcast Serial. A non-fiction podcast, the first series focused on a murder investigation, 134 TEACHING STEPHEN KING with executive producer Sarah Koenig “investigating the 1999 murder of high school senior Hae Min Lee, allegedly by Hae’s ex-boyfriend Adnan Sayed” (Maerz 15), who was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for the crime. In Serial, Koenig reviews the evidence and investigation in an attempt to get at the truth of what happened to Lee and whether Sayed is, in fact, her murderer. While many listeners enthusiastically embraced the unique format of Serial, others found the lack of formulaic progression frustrating. As Melissa Maerz explains in “Serial: The Podcast You Need to Hear,” “Of course, real life isn’t tightly plotted like television. Some fans have complained that certain episodes of Serial, like the one in which Koe- nig consults the Innocence Project about the holes in the case, do nothing to further our knowledge of who killed Hae. But maybe that’s the whole point. There’s no showrunner writing this story” (16). Instead, Serial’s format and the ongoing exploration helmed by Koenig echo the uncertainties, false starts, and constantly negotiated perceptions of real life. As Maerz points out, in Serial, “Red herrings aren’t placed in our path for some narrative reason—they’re just a fact of life” (ibid.). In its first season,Serial was released on a weekly basis and, like King, Koenig and company had no idea where the season would end up, though the podcast’s stakes are consider- ably higher, including Sayed’s possible exoneration and closure for the Lee family. The nature—and even potential existence—of a narrative conclusion is never assured. As Maerz reflects, “Even if Koenig finds enough evidence to exonerate Adnan by the season’s end, the law can’t free a wrongly imprisoned man in time for the finale. And say Adnan is exonerated—that doesn’t mean he’s not guilty” (ibid.). In addition to engaging the listener in this dynamic and interactive way, considering the evidence alongside Koe- nig, Serial also forces listeners to consider the nature of the criminal justice system, their own biases and assumptions, and the ways in which real life is often shoehorned into less complex and contradictory forms, for the sake of familiarity and easier consumption. Finally, serialization has become a distinguishing feature of a wide variety of ebooks, reflecting not only shifts in literary trends but the way people read as well. As the Wall Street Journal’s Alexander Alter argues, serialization “is rebounding in the digital era . . . [because] The growing use of tablets, smartphones, and e-ink devices has created a vibrant new market for short fiction as readers flock to stories they can digest in one sitting.” E-readers from the Kindle to the nook and even smartphones have changed the way people read, allowing them to have a wealth of options at their fingertips at any given moment.9 Given this dynamic new market, both traditional and digital-exclusive publishers “are experimenting with the same type of short, episodic fiction that weekly or monthly periodi- cals published in the 19th century” (Alter), with serial publication focused SERIAL PUBLISHING AND THE GREEN MILE 135 especially in popular genres such as romance/erotica and science fiction. Sean Platt, co-author of several serialized digital novels, argues that “The Charles Dickens model actually fits better now than ever because people want bite-sized content” (qtd. in Alter). Some of these are published as stand-alone installments, much like The Green Mile, though with the accessibility of e-readers, for some works, readers can pay the purchase price for the serial novel and their e-reader will automatically download each new segment as it is released (Alter). As Keith Wagstaff points out in “Must Read: Serial Novels Get Second Life with Smartphones, Tablets,” digital serial publication makes good financial sense too: “From a sales perspective, it’s probably a better idea than returning to traditional publishing. Sales of ebooks exploded from $68 million in 2008 to $3 billion in 2012, according to the Association of American Publishers. That represents an increase from 1 percent of the market to 23 percent of the market—all while hardcover and paperback book sales fell flat or declined.” However, contemporary readers and viewers have become even more accustomed to instant gratification than they were in the mid-1990s and at the other end of the consumption continuum, original television series’ seasons are now often available all at once, ideal for binge viewing, such as Netflix original programming like Orange Is the New Black (2013–present) and the fourth season of the network-cancelled cult series Arrested Devel- opment (2013), and Amazon original series, including Transparent (2014– present). As a result, the serial approach—whether in film, television, or literature—often tries the patience of consumers who feel entitled to the next segment on their own terms and within their own time frame. For example, Amazon reviews of Beth Kerry’s romance novel Because You Are Mine, which was released in eight segments, express this frustration and dissatisfaction: “‘I am really sick of sitting down to read this book and just when you are enjoying it, it ends,’ one Amazon reviewer seethed. ‘Release the whole book, I would enjoy it more,’ another wrote” (qtd. in Alter). This echoes some readers’ sentiments toward The Green Mile as well, as they impatiently awaited the next month’s installment, though many readers learned to savor this anticipation as a defining facet of this unique publication approach. 10

Ebooks

he premiere of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader in 2007 was a game-changer Tfor the book world, impacting both the business end of publishing and the experience of many readers, though the pros and cons of this new development are still being energetically debated almost a full decade later. With often significantly lower per book prices, the instant gratification of acquiring new books with a single click, and the possibility of having access to a full library in the palm of one’s hand, e-readers are a boon for avid readers, though for many the virtual version falls short of the full experience of a print book, with its heft, presence, and aesthetic appeal, including that familiar and oft-celebrated “old book smell.” Both mediums have their own unique appeal and very few readers do so exclusively within the digital domain, with e-readers instead creating “more ways for consumers to access their books and music” (LaFemina) rather than replacing print books. As Gerry LaFemina explains in “How the Publishing World Acclimated to the Digital Revolution (Part 1),” according to a Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project study, “about 20 percent of U.S. adults have read an e-book in the past year,” a rate that jumps with younger readers to 47% (LaFemina). The near- effortless accessibility of e-content may also be impacting readers’ habits as well, in both content and quantity. As LaFemina summarizes the Pew study findings, “Ebook users tend to read more books than those who read only print material. A typical ebook user read 24 books in the past year, compared with the 15 books reported by typical non-ebook users. A third of those people who read e-content say they read more than they did before ebooks” (LaFemina). In addition, the lower production cost of ebooks also creates more publishing opportunities for niche or specialty authors, both self-published and under the umbrella of major publishers, and LaFemina argues that ebooks are “changing not only how we read but what we read and by whom.” While the majority of readers still savor the experience of 138 TEACHING STEPHEN KING browsing through their favorite bookstore—whether a massive Barnes and Noble or their independent neighborhood shop—Amazon’s Kindle store and other ebook marketplaces have a vast collection, far more than any physical bookstore could feasibly keep in stock, and all available with a single click. Beyond accessibility issues, ebook exclusives also “let authors experiment with style and form” (Lee), proving to be a format especially well suited to works that are longer than a traditional short story but shorter than a full-length novel. King has embraced this new format, publishing electronically even before the mainstream popularity of e-readers, such as the Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s nook. In 2000, King’s novella Riding the Bullet was published as the first ebook, priced at $2.50; it “sold over 400,000 copies in the first 24 hours” (Habash) and “was downloaded over 2.5 times per second during its peak days” (Charski). Riding the Bullet tells the story of Alan Parker, a college student who hitchhikes back home when his mother is hospitalized following a stroke and catches a ride with a dead man. With the familiar eeriness of a traditional ghost story or campfire tale, King taps into the rich vein of urban—and rural—legend to create the story of a young man faced with a terrible decision: to choose between his own life and that of his mother. However, as Alan thinks to himself mid- ride, “the worst stories are the ones you’ve heard your whole life. Those are the real nightmares” (Riding 539). Riding the Bullet is a substantial story, running just over fifty pages in the mass market paperback edition of Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (2002), the collection in which it was eventually published in print; it is both narratively familiar and atmo- spherically disturbing. Reflecting on his decision to market Riding the Bul- let as an individual ebook, King says that in working with new mediums, part of this drive for experimentation and evolution is simply “Curiosity. I just wanted to see what would happen” (qtd. in Lehmann-Haupt 93). In addition, from a writing standpoint, as he explains in the introduction to Everything’s Eventual, “it’s about trying to see the act, art, and craft of writing in different ways, thereby refreshing the process and keeping the resulting artifacts—the stories, in other words—as bright as possible” (xi). As the overwhelming number and speed of downloads of Riding the Bullet demonstrate, King’s experiment in publishing was inarguably successful from a marketing standpoint and, in fact, made him an overnight sensation among business and marketing audiences in a way unlike any he had experienced earlier in his career, despite his popular success and long- standing best-seller status. However, as King was disappointed to find, in the midst of all these questions about and enthusiasm surrounding the groundbreaking technological and commercial success of Riding the Bul- let, “it was always the business aspect of it, the bucks, that was driving the EBOOKS 139 interest” (qtd. in Lehmann-Haupt 93). As King mourns, “nobody cared about the story. Hell, nobody even asked about the story, and do you know what? It’s a pretty good story, if I do say so myself. Simple but fun. Gets the job done” (“Introduction: Practicing” xix, emphasis original). As is perhaps inevitable for the first of its kind, the novelty of the process eclipsed the quality of the product itself, at least in the technological and marketing sectors of the public audience. Riding the Bullet was the opening salvo in the e-publishing revolution that waited just a few years down the road, and brought some small bit of attention to the question of how we read what we read, above and beyond the text itself. In 2000, King also self-published a serial ebook project, The Plant, which was posted in installments on his website. The Plant is written in the epistolary style, made up a series of letters and interoffice memos that are the pulse of the publishing offices of Zenith House, including details about the voracious plant that takes over their offices and lives. Unencrypted, King asked readers to pay on the honor system, with a recommended amount of one dollar per installment. Beyond the story itself, King also “described [The Plant] as a metaphor for the way the publishing industry views the net” (qtd. In Flood). As King explained:

The Plant happens to be about a voracious supernatural vine that begins to grow wild in a paperback publishing house. It offers success, riches and the always desirable Bigger Market Share. All it wants from you in return is a little flesh . . . a little blood . . . and maybe a piece of your soul . . . What made The Plant such a hilarious internet natural (at least to my admittedly twisted mind) was that publishers and media people seem to see exactly this sort of monster whenever they contemplate the net in general and e-lit in particular: a troublesome strangler fig that just might have a bit o’ the old profit in it. If, that is, it’s handled with gloves. (qtd. In Flood)

When King began The Plant, he made a deal with readers: he would keep writing and releasing installments “only if at least 75 percent of its readers complied with his honor-system payment plan” (“Stephen King Buries The Plant”). While the honor system worked well for early chapters, it dwindled as additional segments were released, plunging from 78 percent paying for the first installment to only 46 percent paying for the fourth (ibid.). King left the novel unfinished after the sixth chapter, which he released online free of charge, though according to King, the money was not the sole motivating factor. In the end, King says, the story just ran out of steam and “there was always the sense of pushing the story along” (qtd. in Lehmann- Haupt 93). While The Plant remains unfinished, King hasn’t written off the possibility of returning to it, either in terms of the story itself or non- traditional delivery methods. 140 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

While Riding the Bullet and The Plant opened the door on new e-publication possibilities, they were far from the start of a revolution: to maintain ideal and readable format, these early ebooks often had to be printed (Stross), falling short of the accessibility that would come to characterize ebooks with the advent of dedicated e-readers, such as the Kindle and the nook several years later. With the increasing popularity of e-readers, King has ventured further into mainstream e-publication with several unique projects, including Kindle exclusives like UR, Kindle Singles, collaborative projects with other authors including Stuart O’Nan and Joe Hill, and Guns, a non-fiction essay published in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in late 2012.

When Amazon planned the release of the second version of its popular Kin- dle, a partnership with King and his willingness to embrace new technology was a natural fit. As King explained in anEntertainment Weekly column, “Inspector of Gadgets,” in 2008 his agent, Ralph Vicinanza, told King that Amazon was “going to introduce a new version of the Kindle . . . and asked if I might like to write an original story to be published exclusively in that format” (20). With this in mind, King wrote UR, a novella about a magical Kindle, which gives English professor Wesley Smith access to worlds of literature beyond his own, millions of alternate universes—or urs—including thousands of books unwritten in Wesley’s own. As King continued, “Gad- gets fascinate me, particularly if I can think of a way they might get weird” (ibid.), and Wesley’s Kindle is definitely weird, showing up the next day, with no instruction booklet, and pale pink rather than the then standard- issue white. Wesley quickly becomes obsessed with the Kindle, nearly hyp- notized by the potential presented by “So many authors, so many Urs, so little time” (UR, ch. 3). Wesley’s voracious reading takes a darker turn when he discovers that in addition to literature, his Kindle can also be used to access back issues of the New York Times in these alternate worlds, as well as local newspaper stories from the future in his own universe, through which he discovers a looming tragedy and with this knowledge, the chance to avert it.1 Unlike King’s earlier experiments with e-publication, UR became part of an ongoing conversation, an established trend with increasing popularity, if short of widespread adoption. At the center of debates about e-readers versus print books is often not so much what people read but how they read, they ways in which they access, interact with, and consume the text itself. Wesley orders his Kindle in a pique, following a fight with his girlfriend EBOOKS 141

Ellen that, at least on the surface, is about books and reading. Ellen is the women’s basketball coach at the same college where Wesley teaches and their argument carries an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, with Ellen lashing out not only at Wesley but at the book he holds—and which holds his attention—as well. With Wesley distracted by the book in his hand, Ellen tears it from him and throws it across the room, demanding, “Why can’t you read off the computer, like the rest of us?” UR( , ch. 1). This question punctuates the end of their relationship, though in the later days, Wes- ley orders the Kindle and “in a way he still didn’t completely understand, he had done it to get back at her. Or make fun of her. Or something” (ibid.). Wesley thinks of himself as above this populist entertainment and relishes the idea of telling his colleagues and Ellen herself that he is “experimenting with new technology” (ibid.). This negotiation of different ways of reading plays out in Wesley’s literature classroom as well, where he and his students have a spirited, tug-of-war debate over the merits of e-readers versus print books. E-readers have, for better or worse, changed the way readers interact with the text before them. Well beyond the personal preferences of individual readers, these two different types of reading engage distinct parts of the brain. According to a Public Radio International interview with Manoush Zomorodi, “Neuroscience . . . has revealed that humans use different parts of the brain when reading from a piece of paper or from a screen. So the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards ‘non-linear’ reading—a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page” (“Your paper brain”). This non-linear reading is in contrast to what Zomorodi calls “deep reading,” which is more linear and engaged, the type of reading that most do with a printed text. The majority of readers alternate between the types of reading in which they engage—reading both in print and online, whether Internet text on a computer screen or e-readers—which results in a balance of these multiple literacies and reading practices. However, as Zomorodi explains, “The problem is that many of us have adapted to reading online just too well. And if you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain, you lose the deep reading part of your brain” (qtd. in “Your paper brain”). M. O. Thiruna- rayanan similarly considers the distinctions between reading a printed book and reading online, explaining that a traditional “printed book is much more conducive to promoting thinking than the sophisticated Web” because of the different ways a reader engages with and consumes the text. As Thirunarayanan explains, with traditional reading “The time spent in thought will in many instances enable a person to generate an answer to the question that aroused his or her curiosity in the first place. On the Web, it is an entirely different story, one where clicking dominates thinking.” 142 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

Without the deep thinking that accompanies traditional reading, it also stands to reason that retention of material read electronically could be an issue: once the answer is found, it doesn’t necessarily need to be remembered or critically engaged with. After all, if the question comes up again, with a quick Google search, the answer is just seconds away. This has a wealth of potential repercussions for the digital generation, many of whom are growing up with unprecedented screen time, from tablets and laptops to smartphones and e-readers. As Wesley’s student Robbie Henderson argues—an argument in which he is unanimously supported by his fellow students—the Kindle has many advantages. As Robbie explains, “It’s pretty neat. You can download books from thin air, and you can make the type as big as you want. Also, the books are cheaper because there’s no paper or binding” (UR, ch. 1). With these unique features, readers have significant levels of choice, with the instant gratification of reading what they want when they want, as well as altering the appearance of the text itself, including font size and visual layout.2 Wesley is placated by these advantages, though they fall short of his ideal reading experience and he responds to these possibilities with the imprecation to his students that “Books are real objects. Books are friends” (ibid., emphasis original). While Wesley extols the merits of “old school” (ibid.) books and his students take up the charge of e-readers, they come to the common ground that books “are ideas and emotions” (ibid.), regardless of the medium in which they are read. The debate of pros and cons between print and ebooks continues to shape the landscape of contemporary reading. Alongside this ongoing discussion, markets continue to shift to appeal to consumer demands and as Daisy Maryles explains in Publisher’s Weekly, “the publishing model has indeed changed and . . . what is available in ebook format is ubiquitous” (33). As the statistics from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project demonstrate, younger readers are much more likely than the previous generation to access texts electronically, whether via e-readers, laptops, tablets, or smartphones, and the experience of reading is undeni- ably changing for many. So given his prolific publishing history and his embrace of new technologies with UR and other works, where does King come down on the print versus ebook debate? As he concluded his technological reflections in the “Inspector of Gadgets” column, despite the many benefits and apps of e-readers, “my e-reader will never completely replace my books . . . The real problem with e-readers, and what may save the embattled publishing industry, is simply consumer resistance. There are lots of advantages to the electronic devices—portability, instant buyer gratification, nice big type for aging eyes like mine—but there’s a troubling lightness to the content as well. A not-thereness” (20). At the end of the day, books have a heft and presence that their electronic counterparts lack, EBOOKS 143 despite the identical ideas that lie within. However, any new medium of presentation will continue to provide King—and other authors—with a new venue to transmit those ideas to their readers.

Mile 81

King has published several collections of novellas and stories over the course of his career, where the issue of a specific piece’s length is inconsequential, but finding publishing venues for longer stories as individual works is a challenge.3 Kindle Singles are an ideal fit for works that are too long to be considered a short story yet too short to be published as a standalone novel. Typically ranging from 5,000–30,000 words, the Kindle Single format allows authors to present works “at their natural length,” as Amazon’s press release termed it (qtd. in Gough). As The Guardian’s Julian Gough explained, “Writers can seldom express ideas ‘at their natural length,’ because in the world of traditional print only a few lengths are commercially viable” (Gough). There’s a set range for print works considered marketable and woe betide the author who strays outside those parameters: “Write too long, and you’ll be told to cut it (as Stephen King was when The Stand came in too long to be bound in paperback). Worse, write too short, and you won’t get published at all. Your perfect story is 50 pages long—or 70, or 100? Good luck getting that printed anywhere” (Gough). Kindle Singles fill this void very effectively, presenting shorter works by both bestselling and lesser known authors for a lower price, with most Kindle Singles costing under five dollars. Kindle Singles create a market for works that would be unlikely to get standalone publication elsewhere and, for an author such as King, with his legions of devoted fans, can provide readers with new work to enjoy while they wait for the next full-length novel or collection of stories. In 2011, King published the ebook exclusive Mile 81. Less meta-textually linked to its technology of transmission than UR—and therefore, perhaps a bit less “gimmicky”—Mile 81 is classic King, picking up several themes familiar from his larger body of work, including children in extraordinary circumstances, cars with supernatural powers,4 and terrors from beyond the stars. In Mile 81, King picks up these larger themes, but addresses them in microcosm, with the action limited to an abandoned rest area over a few summer afternoon hours. A quick pop of horror and unsettling eeriness, Mile 81 has the feel of a vintage Twilight Zone episode: backstories remain largely undeveloped aside from a few broad stroke character details, the conclusion shies away from tidy narrative closure, and the horror itself remains largely unexplained, temporarily averted but far from defeated. 144 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

The day begins with ten-year-old Pete Simmons, left behind by his older brother and friends, setting out to explore the abandoned rest area at Mile 81, where he finds all kinds of adolescent bacchanalia left behind by older kids, from a half full bottle of vodka to a gallery of Hustler center- folds. But as young Pete dozes off his found booze, a battered, mud-splattered, and nondescript station wagon pulls to a stop on the exit ramp just outside: empty, evil, and hungry, “an unearthly predator, luring unsuspecting passersby to a hideous fate” (“Mile 81”). Over the course of the story’s approximately eighty pages, concerned and well-meaning motorists pull off the turnpike to offer their help, including a convention-bound insur- ance man, a hefty woman hauling a horse trailer, and the Lussier family. As Doug Clayton, the first person to stumble across the seemingly abandoned car reaches out to touch it, his hand slides effortlessly through its surface and almost instantaneously, “His fingers were barely there. He could see only the stubs of them, just below the last knuckles where the back of his hand started . . . He could feel something, oh dear God and dear Jesus, something like teeth. They were chewing. The car was eating his hand” (Mile 81, ch. 2). Clayton is quickly consumed by the car, only his cell phone and wedding ring remaining on the pavement nearby, an ominous warning to the next passerby. However, as in much of King’s fiction, an inability to believe the impossible proves fatal and while the next people to encounter the car rationalize what they see and attempt to reason away their deep sense of unease, the car continues to feed, consuming Julianne Vernon, Johnny and Carla Lussier, and Trooper Jimmy Golding. The Lussier children, Rachel and Blake, witness the car devouring their parents and warn Trooper Golding—as Rachel tells him, “you shouldn’t go near that car, Trooper Jimmy. It bites and it eats and it’s sticky” (Mile 81, ch. 5, emphasis original)—but in the tradition of hard-headed and logical folks who come to bad ends in King’s fiction, Trooper Golding can’t resist a closer look, sure that there must be a logical explanation, right up until the moment the car consumes him as well. In the end, it is the children who must save themselves. King’s canon is full of both extraordinary children and ordinary children put in extraordinary circumstances, from Danny Torrance of The Shining and Charlie McGee of Firestarter (1980) to ’Salem’s Lot’s Mark Petrie and Desperation’s David Carver. As Tony Magistrale argues in “Inherited Haunts: Stephen King’s Terrible Children,” “Most of his fictional adolescents find themselves enmeshed in the dark complexities of an adult world; they are not responsible . . . but they are nonetheless forced into coping with the consequences of such events” (59). After Pete witnesses Trooper Golding disappear into the car, he and the Lussier children take matters into their own hands, as they must. As Pete thinks to himself, when the police show up EBOOKS 145

“they wouldn’t believe. They would eventually, they’d have to, but maybe not before the monster car ate a bunch more of them” (Mile 81, ch. 6). With childlike simplicity, Pete takes his life in his hands and takes on the car with nothing but a magnifying glass, though this is enough to succeed where adult rationalization and curiosity have failed. The car’s flank begins to blacken and then smoke and “it shot up into the blue spring sky. For a moment longer it was there, glowing like a cinder, and then it was gone. Pete found himself thinking of the cold darkness above the envelope of the earth’s atmosphere—those endless leagues where anything might live and lurk” (ibid.). The story ends with this incomplete and temporary reprieve, with the future of the now-orphaned Lussier kids uncertain, the monster chased away but far from bested.

A Face in the Crowd, with Stuart O’Nan

King’s passion for baseball in general and the Boston Red Sox in particular is well known, an interest that has been reflected in some of his fiction as well, including The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)—published as a novel and later, in 2004, as a pop-up children’s book—and the specialty press mini-book Blockade Billy (2010). In what would go on to become the Red Sox World Series-winning season in 2004, King and fellow novelist Stuart O’Nan5 began talking and writing about baseball, a conversation that culminated in their co-authored book Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. As a Publisher’s Weekly review summarizes their collaboration, “O’Nan acts as a play-by-play announcer, calling the details of every game . . . while King provides colorful com- mentary, making the games come alive by proffering his intense emotional reactions to them” (“Faithful” 32). In 2012, King and O’Nan collaborated once more, bringing their dual loves of baseball and fiction together with the Kindle Single A Face in the Crowd. While UR’s tension tapped into a Kindle with otherworldly powers, in A Face in the Crowd, Dean Evers’s television and cell phone prove to be an unexpected link to the afterlife, as well as to his own past sins and regrets. A widower living in Florida, baseball—specifically Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball, his adopted snowbird team—is one of Dean’s great pleasures, often on the television as he sits down to his solitary dinners. The games are a harmless entertainment, good for filling his lonely hours, until one night he sees a face from his past: his childhood dentist Dr. Young, “sitting alone in his white sanitary smock with his thin, pomaded hair slicked back, solid and stoic as a tiki god” (King and O’Nan). As the nights and games pass, Dean continues to see familiar faces in the crowd, including Lester Embree, a dead boy from his childhood; his domineering former business 146 TEACHING STEPHEN KING partner Leonard Wheeler; and his departed wife, Ellie. “The shadows from Dean’s past get closer with each game” (Rogers 35) and as Dean looks upon these specters he must also confront his own old sins: Dean and his childhood friends bullied Lester and shortly thereafter the boy disappeared and was discovered drowned in a local pond. Dean blackmailed Wheeler in order to buy him out of their shared business and he was unfaithful to his wife, having an affair with his secretary. Later, he sees a girl he raped as a young man, though he glosses over the true nature of this sexual assault, recalling her as “the one who’d been sort of semiconscious—or maybe unconscious would be closer to the truth—when he’d had her” (King and O’Nan, emphasis original). The ghosts are not content to simply appear to Dean, but instead reach out to him, implicating him, drawing him toward them. When he sees Lester, “the quiet boy Evers and his friends had witnessed being pulled wrinkled and fingerless from Marsden’s Pond rose and pointed one fish-nibbled stub not at the play developing right in front of him, but, as if he could see into the air-conditioned, dimly lit condo, directly at Evers” (ibid.). After Dean’s dead wife appears on the television screen, right behind home plate, then calls him on his cell phone and takes him to task for his many shortcomings—his infidelity, being a largely absent father in their son’s life—Dean swears off watching baseball. That is, until the night that his old friend Chuckie Kazmierski calls to tell him that he can see Dean on television, right behind home plate for the Rays—Red Sox game. Racing down to Tropicana Field in an attempt to come face-to-face with this ghostly version of himself, Dean becomes the ghost, learning of his own recently discovered death as in the ballpark seats around him, Dean is surrounded by “all the people he’d ever wronged in his life” (King and O’Nan), forced to face the sins he has committed against others as his former solace transforms into purgatory.

In the Tall Grass, with Joe Hill6

King has become a repeat collaborator with his son and fellow horror writer, Joe Hill, including their work on the short story “Throttle” and its graphic novel adaptation, Road Rage, both of which are discussed in the next chapter. In 2012, King and Hill collaborated on a long story, In the Tall Grass, which was originally published over two separate summer issues of Esquire magazine and then released as a Kindle Single in October of that same year, through which it would reach a significantly larger audience. Reminiscent of King’s classic short story “Children of the Corn,” In the Tall Grass begins mid-road trip, in the rural expanses of the Great Plains, when Cal and Becky DeMuth—a brother and sister duo rather than the EBOOKS 147 troubled husband and wife of “Children of the Corn”—hear cries for help from a field of tall grass. Like the good Samaritans who meet their grisly end at the abandoned Mile 81 rest stop, the DeMuths stop to help and find themselves drawn ever further into the field and ever deeper into a nightmare. In the Tall Grass is also similar to Mile 81 in that it addresses horror tropes familiar from King and Hill’s longer works in microcosm, including loss, isolation, and the sacrifices that must be made for survival. In Danse Macabre, King argues that good horror does its work on two levels: the first is what he calls the “gross-out” (3), the visceral abjection of blood, guts, and gore. The second is more psychological, more nuanced and here “on another, more potent level, the work of horror really is a dance—a moving, rhythmic search . . . [which is] looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level” (Danse Macabre 4). Much of contemporary horror relies heavily on the first of these techniques, but King argues, “it is on that second level of horror that we often experience that low sense of anxiety which we call ‘the creeps’” (Danse Macabre 6). In the Tall Grass achieves both of these types of horror, with a bit of Lovecraftian cosmic terror thrown in for good measure. After Cal and Becky’s instinctual humanitarian response to save the woman and child lost in the tall grass, the situation quickly takes on an ominous tone, a creepy and not quite right sense of dread. Once they enter the field of grass, they are almost immediately separated and no matter how they call, follow one another’s voices, and search for each other, they remain apart. Disorientation sets in and “reality was starting to feel much like the ground underfoot: liquid and treacherous. [Cal] could not manage the simple trick of walking toward his sister’s voice, which came from the right when he was walking left, and from the left when he was walking right. Sometimes from ahead and sometimes from behind. And no matter which direction he walked in, he seemed to move farther from the road” (King and Hill, In the Tall Grass). Once lost, it is impossible to find their way again and the field is constantly shifting them and shifting around them. There is plenty of “gross-out” horror to be found among the tall grass, including dead animals, maggoty decomposition, and cannibalistic feasts, but the true terror of In the Tall Grass is in the dehumanization of those who are lost within it, as screams turn into laughter and men turn into monsters. Deep in the heart of the tall grass is an artifact of cosmic horror, a black rock that, once touched, enlightens those who are lost, shows them the way, and makes them one with the grass that surrounds them. As Lovecraft explains cosmic terror in his classic essaySupernatural Horror in Literature, 148 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and porten- tousness becoming its subject of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. (28)

At the center of the field, presumably the cause of its ever-shifting directions and the madness of those trapped within, is the black rock. As the lost boy, Tobin, tells Cal, “When you touch the rock—hug it, like—you can see. You just know a lot more. It makes you hungrier, though” (King and Hill, In the Tall Grass). Lovecraft’s stories are full of men and women who read what they shouldn’t or look upon what they should turn away from, and whose sanity is lost as a result, from “The Call of Cthulhu” to “The Rats in the Walls,” and the irresistible knowledge Cal, Becky, and the others gain through the black rock in the tall grass seals their fate and dooms them to a never-ending nightmare. Cosmic horror and real life horror intersect once again when Cal comes to the realization that the people who live near the field cannot be oblivious to its effect:They “ probably love this old field. And fear it. And worship it . . . And sacrifice to it” (King and Hill, In the Tall Grass, emphasis original). Having been sacrificed, they have no choice but to call to others to do the same. Touching the rock and becoming one with the field of grass, Cal and Becky’s are among the desperate voices that cry out for help to the next passersby.

Guns

Another unique feature of ebooks is the potential for expedited publication, since without the labor intensive process of print publication—including layout, print, binding, and shipping—ebooks can make it from author to reader significantly faster. An excellent example of this is King’s essay Guns, his reflection on gun violence in America, written in the immediate aftermath of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Con- necticut,7 where, on December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and he killed twenty children and six adults. The horror of this violence radiated outward from Newtown and set fire to the long- standing debate over gun control in America. In Guns, King provides an overview of the media culture surrounding school shootings and other acts of rampage violence in his opening chapter, “The Shake.” With 22 distinct stages, King chronicles the media EBOOKS 149 response to this type of violence from the shooting itself, to initial speculative coverage, video and eyewitness reports, expert interviews, and heated tugs of war between politicians, the gun control lobby, and the National Rifle Association, all of which eventually becomes shunted to the margins by a new, newsworthy disaster and forgotten, at least until the next school shooting, when it is all repeated step-by-step once again (Guns, ch. 1). He goes on to discuss his novella Rage, which he pulled from publication after it was linked to several school shootings, as well as the current climate of the gun control debate in America. King wraps up Guns with a series of three suggestions: comprehensive background checks, a ban on magazines that hold more than ten rounds, and a ban on guns classified as “assault weapons” (Guns, ch. 6). King positions himself to take a moderate stance, lamenting that “Political discourse as it once existed in America has given way to useless screaming” (Guns, ch. 3). Rather than staking out and defending one corner of an overly simplistic pro or con debate, King instead “repeatedly emphasizes the need for all sides to work together” (Charles). As both a liberal “blue-state Ameri- can” and unapologetic gun owner, King appeals to readers from a wide range of perspectives and, as David Haglund argues, “This already puts him more in the middle on this issue than many gun control advocates, and probably gives him at least a little bit of credibility with some gun owners.” As The Guardian’s Rory Carroll writes of Guns, “In folksy, salty prose which blends policy prescription with dark humour, King alternately cajoles, praises and insults gun advocates in what appears to be a genuine pitch to change their minds.” King’s goal was to interject this argument into the conversation taking place in the immediate aftermath of the tragic violence at Sandy Hook, and the Kindle Single format allowed him to do exactly that: the shootings took place on December 14, 2012, and Guns was released little more than a month later, on January 25, 2013. As King explained, “I think the issue of an America awash in guns is one every citizen has to think about. If this helps provoke constructive debate, I’ve done my job. Once I finished writing ‘Guns,’ I wanted it published quickly” (qtd. in Minzesheimer). As a result of the immediacy available for e-publications, King finished Guns and submitted it to Amazon, which had it in the hands of readers only a week after he had completed the essay. In this respect, the Kindle Single format has the potential to have a profound impact on the discourse surrounding current events and issues. As Ron Charles of the Washington Post points out, “Amazon’s Kindle Single platform is part of a dramatic shift in the publishing industry that allows authors to respond to current events quickly and in longer form that most magazines and newspaper op-ed sections can accommodate,” a further extension of the Kindle Single’s niche for works that are longer than a traditional essay or short story but shorter than a standalone book. 150 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

With Guns, King’s argument reached a wide audience, though whether it was the most productive possible audience or had the dialogue-sparking impact he was aiming for is open to debate, and in this case, the Kindle Single format’s greatest strength may also be one of its greatest weaknesses. After the publication of Guns, many readers posted their personal reviews of and responses to King’s essay on its’ Amazon page. As the New York Times’s Benjamin Samuel writes in “Why Stephen King Was Wrong to Publish ‘Guns’ as a Kindle Single,” “Although Amazon reviews are far from the ideal forum for thoughtful discourse, the numbers have a lot to say. Of the 100 most helpful 5-star reviews, 75% are marked ‘Amazon Ver- ified Purchase’ (meaning the customer at least bought the eBook). Of the 98 total 1-star reviews, that percentage drops to 22.” What these numbers indicate, Samuel explains, is that “we can assume that 78% of the 1-star reviewers, the people who claim to disagree with King’s views, likely haven’t even read the book. They are simply responding to the notion of an anti-gun book, rather than the contents of this book” specifically. This type of review sabotage frequently occurs in response to strongly par- tisan and emotionally loaded topics. For example, Jody Raphael’s book Rape Is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming Are Fueling a Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis elicited a plethora of one-star reviews, the majority of which focus on her critical analysis of the Jerry Sandusky case and its repercussions for Penn State football, with little context indi- cating reviewers had read the book or considered the issues impacting rape and sexual assault as a whole. Another example is Alexandra Rob- bins’s Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, of which many self-identified Greek life participants posted scathing one-star reviews, again without much context or consideration of the book in its entirety; one anonymous poster even begins her review on this book’s Amazon page with the confession that “A [sorority] sister of mine I hadn’t spoken with in a while asked me to write a negative review for this book” (“Pledged”). As Forbes’ Suw Charman-Anderson writes of these “fake reviews,” “Carpet- bombers do not leave negative reviews in order to help readers avoid a bad book, they do it to undermine the reader’s confidence in positive reviews, damage the book’s ranking in Amazon and thus that author’s sales.”8 There are almost no feasible responses to effectively address this issue and as Charman-Anderson continues, “At the core of the problem is the fact that there are huge benefits to behaving unethically but very little cost for those caught doing so.” As these examples show, readers and consumers with strong affiliations—whether to the NRA, their college sports team, or their Greek organization—will defend those affiliations and allegiances staunchly, loudly, and with or without critically considering the opposing perspective being offered. EBOOKS 151

By publishing Guns as a Kindle Single, as a work that must be bought and paid for—even at the low price of 99 cents—King may have distanced himself from the very audience he most wanted to reach. As Samuel writes, when it comes to paying for the pleasure, most readers aren’t “willing to pay to have anyone, even Stephen King, tell them that their beliefs, values, and behaviors are wrong.” Perhaps if no buy-in—either literal or figurative—had been required, King’s argument may have gotten a more wide-reaching and diverse range of readers, including those who disagree with his position and arguments. However, given the length and complexity of King’s essay, as well as his drive to get it to readers as soon as possible, it is hard to imagine a publishing medium more ideally suited to this work than the unique Kindle Single format. No publication medium will ever be without its flaws, perfect for every reader and capable of achiev- ing every reading, writing, and marketing aim, but the Kindle Single has created a unique space to reimagine what writing can be and what it can achieve. 11

Graphic Novels

nother non-traditional publishing format in which King has become Aactive in the last decade is that of graphic novels, both adaptations and original narratives, including his previously discussed contribution to Scott Snyder’s American Vampire: Volume 1. In 2007 the first installment of The Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born was released by Marvel, inspired by King’s epic seven-novel Dark Tower series and its gunslinger protagonist Roland Deschain. King said in an interview prior to the first issue’s release, “The first few issues . . . are almost entirely drawn from the books. Readers will recognize them and hopefully be as thrilled as I am” (qtd. in Colton 01d). However, after these early issues, Marvel’s Dark Tower series moved beyond the narrative of King’s own books, delving into times and aspects of Roland’s life that were not featured in the original series, going on to publish nearly a dozen collections featuring the Gunslinger’s exploits, including The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home (2008), The Dark Tower: The Journey Begins (2011), and The Dark Tower: Last Shots (2013). In 2008, Marvel also began publishing a graphic novel adaptation of King’s expansive novel The Stand with Captain Trips (2010), American Nightmares (2010), and The Night Has Come (2013). There have also been standalone graphic novels developed from King’s work, including N. (2010), based on a novella featured in his 2008 collection Just After Sunset, and Little Green God of Agony, a 2012 web comic adapted from a short story of King’s featured in the 2011 anthology A Book of Horrors. King has also collaborated with his son and fellow horror writer Joe Hill1 with Road Rage, which includes graphic novel adaptations of King and Hill’s “Throttle” and the iconic Richard Matheson story “Duel,” from which “Throttle” took inspiration. While the last several years have provided King fans with a wealth of graphic novel adaptations, The Dark Tower and The Standcan be challenging to incorporate into classroom discussion because of the extensive nature of the King novels upon which they are based, with the Dark Tower series spanning seven novels and thousands of pages and the uncut edition of The Stand topping out at over 154 TEACHING STEPHEN KING at well over a thousand pages. However, N., Little Green God of Agony, and Road Rage are easily incorporated into class reading and discussion, with each also providing the opportunity to address the intersection of unique publication contexts.

Teaching Graphic Novels

In recent years, graphic novels have been making their way into a wide variety of classrooms, from elementary schools to college courses and libraries of all kinds, to teach not just classic and contemporary literature, but also memoir, history, science, and rhetoric and writing. As Robert G. Weiner and Carrye Kay Syma argue in Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art,

In the past 10 to 15 years, the use of sequential art in education has exploded. Teachers in secondary and elementary schools, professors in universities, and instructors of all kinds are using comics and graphic novels to illustrate points about gender, history, sociology, philosophy, mathematics, and even medicine. It is no longer a question of whether sequential art should be used in educational settings, but rather how to use it and for what purpose. (1)

There are numerous benefits to teaching graphic novels, including engaging reluctant readers, encouraging students to view familiar material from a new perspective, and critically engaging students’ multiple literacies. In particular, reading comics and graphic novels help students develop visual literacy skills. As Lynell Burmark argues, “the primary literacy of the twenty-first century is visual . . . Our students must learn to process both words and pictures. To be visually literate, they must learn to ‘read’ (consume/interpret) and ‘write’ (produce/use) visually rich communications. They must be able to move gracefully and fluently between text and images, between literal and figurative worlds” (5). Graphic novels are an excellent tool for developing these skills and preparing students to critically engage with and respond to a world that requires simultaneous and interactive multiple literacies. Our contemporary culture is one of dynamic multimodal texts, a trend that extends well beyond the classroom. For instance, the vast majority of websites include text and image, as well as advertise- ments, links to related stories or materials, and even embedded video or audio materials. In addition to strengthening students’ multimodal and visual literacy skills, another characteristic which makes graphic novels an ideal fit for classroom reading and discussion is that, as Weiner and Syma argue, in reading these works “students are using a format that provides an opportunity for active engagement. Their minds are lively when reading GRAPHIC NOVELS 155 comics. The readers involve their minds with both the visual and narrative content, hopefully resulting in great comprehension and interest” (5). Finally, incorporating King’s graphic novels alongside his other literature, whether short stories, novellas, or novels, highlights the constant negotiation and adaptation of his work, his approach to writing, and its connection to the larger world. Just as with more traditional literature—or any other discipline— graphic novels have terminology and conventions that need to be mastered and incorporated into discussion for students to have a truly engaged critical reading experience. While comics and graphic novels are often associated with children and young adults, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of students will be regular comic readers or, in some cases, have ever read a comic or graphic novel. Even those who have may lack the necessary terminology to critically analyze and respond to what they read and see on the page, so a presentation of vocabulary and graphic novel reading strategies is essential when incorporating graphic novels into the classroom, regardless of discipline. Some key terms include:

Panel: Individual boxes within which a specific scene or action is contained, panels can be a variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from a small portion of the page to a full-page image. As legendary comic book artist Will Eisner explains in his 1985 book Comics and Sequential Art, panels “secure control of the reader’s attention and dictate the sequence in which the reader will follow the narrative” (Eisner 40). Gutter: Visual spaces between the panels that separate one scene or action from the next, gutters are one of the most dynamic ways in which the graphic novel engages its readers through their “reading” of the gutters, which require the audience to make a cognitive leap in terms of both the time and space of the narrative being presented. Captions or text boxes: Text that is often visually set apart from the image, captions or text boxes provide the reader with background information, often setting the scene or serving as a narrator guiding the reader through the graphic novel’s story. Dialog balloons: Another textual element, dialog balloons present the reader with the characters’ spoken words or thoughts within the narrative. Thought balloons: Another textual element, thought balloons communicate a character’s unspoken thoughts to the reader, similar to literary internal narration. Sound effects: Textual expression of non-dialogue sounds, examples include the “bam” of a punch, the “slam” of a door, or the “roar” of an angry bear. 156 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

As analysis becomes more critically sophisticated, additional terminology can be introduced, though this basic vocabulary sets students up with the terms and critical reading tools essential to critically engage with graphic novels, whether they are experienced readers or new to the format.2 In addition, many students benefit from a quick tutorial on reading strategies specific to graphic novels, which build upon established reading experiences—left to right, top to bottom—to incorporate the images and the interaction between text and image. Scott McCloud’s 1993 book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art provides an excellent overview of the format, its history, and its near-limitless possibilities. McCloud’s analysis emphasizes two key components to critically reading graphic novels: first, analyzing the image and text within individual panels and second, completing narrative engagement in reading and bridging the gap of the gutters. Every graphic novel has a unique visual style, created by the artists; this can include a combination of factors, such as the use of color versus black and white images, the distance or intimacy with which characters are portrayed (long shot versus close-up, to draw on film terminology), and the type and tenor of the lines themselves the artist uses to create his or her images, whether thick or thin, solid or fragmented. This combination of visual elements sets the tone for the graphic novel and ideally, as with all literature, elicits an emotional response from the reader. The textual elements of captions, dialog balloons, and thought balloons fill in the narrative details, telling the story and giving voice to the graphic novel’s characters. It is the combination of the visual and the textual—what we see and what we read—which makes graphic novels such a unique, challenging, and ultimately rewarding reading experience. As for the gutters between the panels, McCloud explains that “in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea . . . Nothing is seen between the two panels, but experience tells you something must be there” (66–67). Julia Round further explains in Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach, that “The reader’s activity takes place in the gutter . . . for although the reader creates and realizes the bridging events of the story these will never be viewed: their existence is known, but unseen, locked away in the gap between the explicit elements of the story” (58). Given this challenge, the reader then becomes an active participant with the text, “filling in” the action occurring between the two panels.

“N.”

King’s “N.” first appeared as a short story in his 2008 collection Just After Sunset. Through a series of documents, including letters, patient notes, and GRAPHIC NOVELS 157 newspaper stories, “N.” tells the story of a psychiatric patient who comes to see Dr. John Bonsaint, presenting with characteristic symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, including ritualistic counting and placing, though his deeper concern is about the thinning of reality he has experienced at Ackerman’s Field, outside the town of Motton, Maine. What N. describes is a true Lovecraftian horror, dark and hungry, separated from our world by thinnest of barriers, and with his realization of its existence, N. is tasked with keeping it in place, in part by counting and touching the stones in the field, of which there are sometimes seven and other times, eight. N. commits suicide, passing his obsession on to Bonsaint, who in turn leaves a manuscript that transmits this same compulsion to Bonsaint’s sister Sheila, and through him, their childhood friend, Charlie, who is now a well-known media figure and medical reporter. Through this ripple effect, the knowledge of and obsession with the field, and the responsibilities that accompany it, whether real or born of delusion, are passed from one to the other, and as the story ends, N., Dr. Bonsaint, and Sheila are all dead by suicide, and Charlie is on the way to Ackerman’s Field to see for himself. “N.” follows in the tradition of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, in which humanity is overshadowed by powers much greater than itself. As Pete Rawlik outlines the characteristics of cosmic horror in his essay “Defining Lovecraftian Horror,”

The hallmarks of Cosmic Horror include: (1) The majority of humanity does not recognize its own insignificance, the indifference of the universe, or its true nature; (2) Individuals, often detached from society, can gain perspectives that allow them to glimpse reality, but this often leads to insanity; and, (3) Regardless of the knowledge or abilities gained, the protagonist has little hope of affecting the course of events, or of revealing all that has been hidden.

This type of horror was central in much of Lovecraft’s work, including his entire Cthulhu mythos, and “N.” follows this tradition. N., Bonsaint, and Sheila all see through the permeable barriers of their existence into the darkness of the cosmos beyond and in doing so are forced to recognize their own powerlessness and insignificance. Their new insight burdens them with the responsibility to try to protect the world and all of humanity; however, as Rawlik notes is often the case, these attempts are ultimately ineffectual. In addition, much as in “The Call of Cthulhu,” where George Gammell Angell leaves instructions for his notes to be destroyed, remarking that some things are better—and safer—left unknown, the narrator reads on anyway, in “N.” Sheila reads and passes on her brother’s notes, even though they are clearly marked with his command to “BURN THIS” (King, “N.” 186). The curiosity 158 TEACHING STEPHEN KING is too much of a temptation for each character—in the tradition of Pandora, to whom Sheila refers (ibid.)—and ultimately leads to their destruction. “N.” has been graphically adapted in two separate mediums, first as an online series of short animated segments leading up to the publication of Just After Sunset and later, in 2010, as a traditional graphic novel, with both adaptations done by the same writer and artist team, Marc Guggenheim and Alex Maleev. In the introduction to the graphic novel, Guggenheim refers to the animated shorts as “mobisodes—short one to one-and-a-half minute segments that could be downloaded easily on, say a mobile phone” (iv). This graphic adaptation of N. ran in a series of 25 individual episodes, no more than a couple of minutes each, with the run time of the entire series totaling a bit under thirty minutes. The aesthetic of the images— which would be echoed in the graphic novel that followed—are realistic and often darkly shadowed, though lighter, warmer hues are also used to contrast and emphasize the stones of Ackerman’s Field, backlighting them as monolithic and looming. Many of the images that appear in the mobisodes are the same as those that are later featured in the graphic novel, though the video format provides some different possibilities for visual storytelling, including movement and the combination of sound and image. The majority of the images featured in the web series remain fixed and static, much as they would be presented in traditional graphic novel format; however, the combination with video allows the artists to negotiate the images for emphasis, including zooming in on particularly significant elements of the image or panning from one side to another to simulate movement or underscore interaction between characters. There are also some more traditionally moving images, such as the theme of shifting clouds behind characters in several episodes and most significantly, the growing darkness within the stones of Ackerman’s Field in Episode #22, bringing to life the emerging threat of the monster within. Another unique feature of the video web comic format is the combination of sound and image, as the artists cut rapidly between individual images in tempo with the narration, with the visual editing becoming more fast-paced in rhythm with N.’s increasingly panicked and frenetic story. This technique is also especially effective as N.’s obsession passes on to Bonsaint, who begins to sound increasingly like his now-dead patient, and his obsession with the field of stones, realization of the truth within, and quickly fragmenting terror are reflected in Episode #20, with rapid cutting between isolated images emphasizing this desperation, as well as directly echoing N.’s own descent in earlier episodes. In 2010, Guggenheim and Maleev built upon the material of the web series’ mobisodes to create a graphic novel, which was published by Marvel.3 In addition to the characters created in the web series, the basic narrative GRAPHIC NOVELS 159 structure, and many of the featured panels, in the graphic novel adaptation, Guggenheim and Maleev also added to King’s original story, developing additional material, including the history of Ackerman’s Field and what happens when Charlie arrives. In this way, King’s short story serves as both the source for the central story and as inspiration for this narrative expansion. The graphic novel adaptation of N. remains deeply invested in documentation, with full-page panels of newspaper stories and letters. The first page ofN. begins just this way, with a close-up of a yellowed newspaper story titled “Tragedy in Motton,” recounting Andrew Ackerman’s 1911 murder of his wife and daughter, the burning of their home, and Acker- man’s suicide, as well as the report that “There were no eyewitnesses to the incident and Mr. Ackerman’s motivations remain unknown at this point” (Guggenheim and Maleev 1). In the graphic novel’s final pages, Charlie fills in some of the gaps in between, with two full-page panels depicting his article “A River Runs Near It” (Guggenheim and Maleev 81–82), as he recounts how the property was passed on to Ackerman’s niece, Norma, who has inspired “‘ghost stories’ about an elderly woman who lived in a ramshackle cabin on the outskirts of town in the woods that surround Ackerman’s Field” (Guggenheim and Maleev 82). Norma is one of Gug- genheim and Maleev’s key additions to the graphic novel and it is she who passes the responsibility on to N., though he remains unaware of her presence, even when she screams his name (Guggenheim and Maleev 31). Despite his lack of awareness, their suffering becomes inextricably intertwined and their respective suicides are depicted in alternating panels, united in the text boxes featuring Norma’s suicide note (Guggenheim and Maleev 42–44), including her relief that “This man, this simple man, this poor, terrible man, is coming to take my place” (Guggenheim and Maleev 44). The other significant addition Guggenheim and Maleev make is in Char- lie’s pilgrimage to Ackerman’s Field. In both King’s original story and the web series, the tale ends on an ominous note, with Charlie’s own burgeoning obsession as he heads out to see the field and the stones for himself, his motivation masquerading as professional curiosity. Guggenheim and Maleev take Charlie’s story a bit further and though the tenor of the graphic novel’s conclusion echoes that of the previous two versions, the ominously unfinished sense of the graphic novel’s final page implicates the reader as well. In Guggenheim and Maleev’s N., Charlie returns to the circle of stones to find groupies gathered there, several people who read Charlie’s story and found themselves drawn to Ackerman’s Field and the dark power it contains. As Charlie reflects in his own suicide note, “It’s not like I knew they’d be there. But I should have guessed. I should have expected it. American Report’s got a circ upwards of a million. You had to figuresomeone would come out, try to visit the field. Truth be told, I 160 TEACHING STEPHEN KING should be grateful there weren’t more, right?” (Guggenheim and Maleev 86, emphasis original). Having disclosed the secret and brought the monster near escape and the world to the brink of destruction, Charlie does the only thing he can do: he shoots the gathered groupies, then turns the gun on himself. However, even with this final obsession carried through to its fatal climax, the influence of the stones in Ackerman’s Field is still not silenced, as the last two pages of the graphic novel feature a full-page close up of MapQuest directions (Guggenheim and Maleev 92–93), inviting the reader to vicariously participate in the nightmare: to go, to see, to know. All three versions of N.—King’s short story, the web series, and the graphic novel—balance cosmic horror with more realistically grounded fears, including fear of mental illness, bringing ancient terror into conversation with very contemporary concerns. As Andy Bentley writes in his review of the first issue of Guggenheim and Maleev’s graphic novel, as the story progresses, “details such as Ambien, OCD (obsessi[ve] compulsive disorder), and digital cameras emerge that root the story in modern times,” though these contemporary details are simultaneously situated against the backdrop of the 1911 murder and even further back, the ancient horror of the creature within the circle of stones. As Bentley continues, considering the representation of mental illness and diagnosis within N., “King deftly interweaves past and modern fears by posing the question ‘what if the fear felt by OCD victims was truly a guard to protect the world from harm?’ . . . The implication that N’s disease could be transmitted like an infection is quite disturbing.” All three of these versions of N. provide multiple layers of horror in a complex combination of text and image for the reader— or viewer—to sift through and critically consider, including the reality of mental illness, the violence people do to one another, and the supernatural horror of monsters beyond our understanding bent on destruction.

The Little Green God of Agony

King’s story “The Little Green God of Agony” was published in the 2011 anthology A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones. “The Little Green God of Agony” tells the story of Kat McDonald, a nurse specializing in pain patients, and her current charge, Andrew Newsome, a billionaire who is looking for an easy path toward healing rather than doing the necessary hard work of physical therapy that Kat prescribes for him. This desperate search for an end to his pain leads him to Reverend Rideout, a faith healer who promises to “expel” Newsome’s pain (King, “Little” 10), by locating and exorcising the “demon god” (ibid.). Kat’s approach is significantly more pragmatic: only proper physical rehabilitation and the necessary pain GRAPHIC NOVELS 161 that accompanies it will heal Newsome. These two figures stand on opposite sides of Newsome and on diametrically opposed ends of the question of Newsome’s pain, the medical and the spiritual, though in their negotiation of this truth, Kat must also come to some unflattering realizations about herself. Rideout pinpoints Kat’s long experience with pain patients, asking “don’t you think, first in the back of your mind, then more and more towards the front, that they are lollygagging? Refusing to do the hard work? Perhaps even fishing for sympathy? When you enter the room and their faces go pale, don’t you think ‘Oh, now I have to deal with this lazy thing again?’” (King, “Little” 20). Kat has become desensitized to the suffering of her patients and as Rideout continues his analysis of her coldness, her objections become increasingly uncertain, her voice growing softer and less confident. Kat, who much like Newsome, had cast herself as the hero of her own story, must come to terms with herself as compromised, forced to question her every belief about Newsome and the patients who have come before him. Rideout still views her with sympathy, however, refusing to accuse her of outright cruelty: “I don’t believe you’re a coward, merely calloused. Case-hardened” (King, “Little” 21). In bearing witness to Rideout’s—ultimately successful—exorcism, Kat must not only see the reality of Newsome’s pain and his miraculous healing, but she must also face her own lack of empathy and challenge her own perception of herself as a nurturer and healer. While she has an academic understanding of pain, by the exorcism’s conclusion the feel of the green god creeping over the back of her hand promises a more experiential possibility as well, harsh retribution for her doubt and denial. In October 2012 “The Little Green God of Agony” was adapted by comic artist Dennis Calero as “The first horror web comic exclusive to StephenKing.com” (“Little Green God”). The web comic was published over a three-week period, with new “episodes” released on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for a total of 24 installments. As McCloud wrote in Reinventing Comics, his 2000 follow-up to Understanding Comics, web publication has a great deal of potential uses for comics, with the message transmitted through a new medium (177). McCloud embraces these new possibilities, arguing that “For nearly any narrative challenge, digital comics can offer potential solutions unlike anything ever attempted in print” (226), including interactivity and using the overall format to echo the digital context. While the delivery of The Little Green God of Agony web comic negotiates the possibilities of digital publication, released a single page at a time over a period of three weeks, the layout of those individual pages or episodes echoes that of a traditional comic book. The color scheme of Calero’s The Little Green God of Agony echoes the ominous tone of King’s story, visually characterized by stark black lines and deep shadows, with 162 TEACHING STEPHEN KING the infusion of other colors as the story progresses: blue in early episodes as Newsome tells his story and the suspense surrounding Rideout builds, interspersed with warm oranges and yellows highlighting flashbacks of the plane crash, which give way to black coupled with eerie green. As Christopher Schulz argues of this color scheme, Calero’s “use of shadow, light and color recalls the chiaroscuro cinematography of Universal’s classic monster films,” heightening the suspense and offering a connection to the larger horror tradition. In Episode #12, Rideout instructs Newsome to close his eyes and locate his pain, and in this specific moment, the defining colors of the web comic rise to prominence, with Rideout’s face highlighted in tones of pale green. As Kat voices her challenge to Newsome, the colors revert once more to the blue that characterized earlier episodes, though the green returns, at first pale and then gradually intensifying as the exorcism gets underway in Episode #20, with the light and color emerging from Newsome to infect and infuse the panels which follow, dominating the final four episodes. Another visual hallmark of The Little Green God of Agony web comic is the shifting focus on and more significantly, the occlusion of specific characters. While Newsome is a billionaire and sees himself as always in complete control of those around him—if not necessarily able to control his own body—Calero’s images negotiate between and visually underscore the power and inscrutability of Kat and Rideout. As Dominic Umile explains, “Calero inks the first six pages of this comic adaptation in such dramatic plum, black, and blue that the facial features of bespectacled bystander ‘Rideout,’ a man of whom nurse Katherine MacDonald is suspicious, are rarely very distinct.” In individual panels throughout the web comic, these two characters appear isolated from the action, beyond Newsome’s influence and control, a separation that is visually echoed by their frequent appearance as black figures, shown only in silhouette. In the final panel of Episode #3, Rideout stands behind Kat, an ominous and looming figure with only the lenses of his glasses illuminated, mysterious and enigmatic, while in the left foreground of the panel, Kat looks from the corner of her eye, attempting to see into the shadows and know the unknowable, “interested to see how the farmer-looking fellow would go about separating Andy Newsome from a large chunk of his cash.” In the final panel of Epi- sode #4, Rideout still stands apart, in this image a black silhouette looming over Newsome, again with only his glasses’ lenses highlighted as he listens to Newsome’s story, a silent and somber judge, waiting to make his pronouncement. Rideout’s face begins to take on additional detail toward the end of Episode #8, with his facial features, moustache, and shirt collar broadly sketched as he speaks his first, pivotal words: “I don’t heal.” In the next panel, Rideout is shown more closely, though with less definition in a GRAPHIC NOVELS 163 near-woodcut gray and black style as he completes his sentence: “I expel” (King and Calero, Little, Episode #8). Rideout remains largely visible from this point forward in the web comic, with realistic close-ups of Rideout’s face, including an extreme close-up of Rideout’s eyes as he begins the exorcism, praying for strength (King and Calero, Little, Episode #19). However, when Rideout and Kat engage in a test of wills after Kat’s outburst, Kat and Rideout are shown alternately in silhouette, emphasizing the shifting negotiation of power between them, as Kat questions first Rideout’s motivations, then her own abilities and compassion (King and Calero, Little, Episode #15). Kat’s “tough love” is underscored and questioned by this presentation in silhouette again, making her a cipher, unknowable even to herself once she has been forced to face her lack of empathy. Kat is shown from behind in silhouette as she applies the transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) to Newsome’s legs in Episode #3 and shown similarly in silhouette in Episode #7, when Newsome is recounting—and objecting to—one of the doctors’ prognosis that he was “manufacturing [his] own pain,” as well as in the next episode as she encourages Newsome to endure “a little more” (King and Calero, Little, Episode #8). On the final page, Kat is once again shown in silhouette, transformed by her knowledge into a new woman as she tells Melissa that she thinks she can finally imagine the depths of true agony (King and Calero, Little, Episode #24). The combination of image and text in the web comic also allows Calero to navigate easily between and present an inter-textual representation of King’s multiple modes of address in the short story, including omniscient narration, Kat’s thoughts, and the spoken dialogue between characters. All three of these types of address—and their interaction—are featured early in the web comic, in the second panel of the first episode. In this panel, the caption takes on the position of the omniscient narrator, immediately setting up the context of Kat’s thwarted attempts to deliver Newsome’s physical therapy: “Katherine MacDonald, Newsome’s private nurse, could have pointed out, as she did at the start, that the TENS lost their efficacy if they weren’t tight to the outraged nerves they were supposed to soothe, but she was a fast learner. She loosened the strap a little, thinking . . .” (King and Calero, Little, Episode #1). The ellipses which ends the omniscient narration of the caption is immediately picked up as it transitions to Kat’s thought bubble, reflecting her internal dialogue as she anticipates the next line of Newsome’s familiar story, that “The pilot told you there were thunderstorms in the Omaha area” (ibid.), a line of thought that is similarly picked up and vocalized by Newsome’s dialog balloon, in which he repeats Kat’s thoughts almost word-for-word. In this single panel—and one that sets the tone for the complexity and interaction that characterize the web comic as a whole—Calero incorporates these multiple textual approaches 164 TEACHING STEPHEN KING and, most significantly, the flow and interaction between them, to create dynamic engagement and dialogue between the internal and external, the silent and the spoken, and echoing both of these, the power relationship and tenor of the interactions between Kat and her wealthy employer. Finally, the web comic visually depicts the indescribable green blob, which is described in vague terms in King’s short story as “something,” “shapeless,” vaguely “bladderlike” (26), and repeatedly as “the green thing” (26–27) and even more simply, “the thing” (27–28). However, just as the “little green god” eludes written description, even in its visualized form in the web comic it remains amorphous, vaguely defined, a relatively unformed ball of bright green light, the intensification of the pale green that characterized Rideout’s proposal earlier in the web comic. The green blob is first seen in the final panel of Episode #22, foregrounded as a bright green shape outlined with black, growing from intense green in the center to a diluted and foggier green toward the borders, with the suggestion of spikes or nodes along its outer edge. In the final two panels, the blob becomes even more undefined, characterized instead by its movement, with thin green lines charting its trajectory across the room, away from Newsome, up Melissa’s arm and onto her face. The green blob takes precedence in the horizontally extended final page, one of the central panels in a range of several overlapping panels. However, even when the viewer is invited to look directly at the “little green god,” here shown in isolation, divorced from any action, it still remains unknowable, impossible to define or articulate. In the web comic’s final panel, the green god becomes the ultimate unknown, feared but unseen in an almost entirely black panel, broken up by only a smattering of diffuse points of light, as it finds Kat.

Road Rage

Richard Matheson is an icon of contemporary horror, with works including I Am Legend (1954), A Stir of Echoes (1958), Hell House (1971), What Dreams May Come (1978), and a proliferation of short stories and Twilight Zone episodes, including the iconic 1963 episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” where a young William Shatner is tormented by a gremlin on the wing of the airplane in which he is flying. Matheson’s short story “Duel,” originally published in Playboy in 1971, is widely considered a masterpiece of reality-based horror, in which the protagonist, Mann, is terrorized on the highway by a deranged truck driver. In 2009, Tor, a publisher specializing in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, brought together a collection of homages to and stories inspired by Matheson’s prolific body of work in He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson. The opening story GRAPHIC NOVELS 165 of this anthology is “Throttle,” a collaboration by King and Hill. Finally, in 2012 both “Duel” and “Throttle” were adapted to comic book format, with each originally published as two-issue runs, and all four collected together in the hardcover trade edition of Road Rage. King and Hill’s “Throttle” is a new, contemporary take on Matheson’s classic “Duel” and, as is to be expected, the two stories have several similarities, including the isolation of the open road, a murderous truck driver, and a “kill or be killed” conflict. However, King and Hill also provide a dark twist on the familiar story. While Matheson’s “Duel” features a relatively flat Everyman pursued on a murderous, fixated whim by a faceless truck driver, King and Hill invest both pursued and pursuer with more developed characterization and motivation. Vince and his motorcycle gang The Tribe, including his son Race, are on the road driving away from the scene of massacre, having murdered Dean Clarke and his nameless girlfriend in the aftermath of a meth lab fire, and as Vince discovers in the final moments of The Tribe’s confrontation with the truck, the truck driver is the father of the girl they killed. Rather than blind and faceless rage, a random horror that could potentially strike anyone on any day if they’re unlucky enough to cross the path of the wrong trucker, in “Throttle” the trucker is exacting immediate and bloody justice, driven by filial love and grief. The graphic novel adaptations of both stories in Road Rage were written by Chris Ryall, but featured different artists, providing each with a unique visual hallmark, with “Duel” drawn by Rafa Garres and “Throt- tle” by Nelson Daniel. The opening pages of “Duel” are well ordered, with four balanced horizontal panels on each of the first two pages. The panels are bordered by thick black lines with thick white gutters between each, providing clear distinction between each of the self-contained and single-focus panels: Mann’s car, Mann behind the wheel, Mann passing the truck (Road Rage 61–62). However, this logical, precise order—and Mann’s understanding of the world around him—are soon disrupted. As the truck goes roaring past Mann, the gutter separating the third and fourth panels is nearly obliterated by the sound effect of the truck’s deafening engine, represented as a red and jagged series of lower- and upper-case “R”s (Road Rage 63). These sound effects are a central component throughout the comic adaptation of “Duel,” with the increased frequency of the onomatopoetic honking horns, screeching metal, and “shrrrrkkk” of flying gravel Road( Rage 77) echoing the inexorably increasing madness of the situation. As the battle between Mann and the trucker escalates in the first issue, the panels become increasingly disordered, including overlapping panels of varying sizes. For example, when the trucker waves Mann by and Mann finds himself looking at a head-on collision with oncoming traffic, the page includes seven different panels, almost all of which are of dramatically 166 TEACHING STEPHEN KING varying size and focus, from extreme close-ups of the trucker’s hand and Mann’s face to more abstract silhouetted images, and overlapping panels that feature Mann’s face immediately juxtaposed with what he sees: a pickup truck heading directly for him (Road Rage 69). As Mann gets off the road and pulls into a diner’s parking lot, the panel organization shifts back toward a more structured layout, with fewer panels, most of which are conventionally rectangular, with wide white gutters. Order is temporarily restored, though as Mann emerges from the diner’s restroom he realizes that his nightmare is not yet over, with the hulking truck outside featured in a single full-page panel and Mann silhouetted before the window (Road Rage 82). The layout of the second issue echoes that of the first, moving from well-ordered to overlapping and visually chaotic, with splintering jagged panels (Road Rage 102–105), individual panels outlined with bright red gutters (Road Rage 94), and embedded circular panels that move the reader between the objective narrative action of the chase and the subjec- tive perspective of Mann’s own point of view (Road Rage 96). While the first issue and the early second issue feature several dialog and thought balloons highlighting Mann’s thoughts and rationalizations, as the comic progresses, the text shifts almost exclusively to text box captions and sound effects. The final page of the comic adaptation of “Duel” features many of these characteristics, including five panels, all characterized by the bright orange of the truck’s explosion and the black contrast of the shadows it casts, a final “K-BOOM!” sound effect of the explosion itself, close-ups of Mann’s anguished face, and an irregularly shaped, un-bordered panel, with Mann standing victorious in silhouette above the wreckage of the flaming truck. The resolution here is featured through three separate, scattered text box captions, echoing the final lines of Matheson’s short story: “Unexpect- edly emotion came. Not dread, at first, and not regret; not the nausea that followed soon. It was a primeval tumult in his mind . . . The cry of some ancestral beast above the body of its vanquished foe” (Road Rage 106). Echoing the increased fragmentation and visual chaos of the page lay- outs, Garres’s art progresses from realistic to exaggerated and abstract. Early in the comic, Mann’s facial features are clearly distinguishable, if starkly drawn. However, as the chase continues, Mann becomes further dehumanized, both in the desperation of his actions and in the style with which his features are represented. Just as the page layout briefly returns to a methodical organization toward the end of the first issue, Mann’s features come briefly back into focus as he examines himself in the diner bathroom’s mirror (Road Rage 81) and as, early in the second issue, he looks around the diner, attempting to identify his tormentor. As the chase intensifies, underscored by the fragmentation of the panels through the latter half of the second issue, Mann’s features begin to become more exaggerated, GRAPHIC NOVELS 167 transforming into a caricature of tortured humanity as his face becomes increasingly indistinct and at times, even bordering on the unrecognizable and monstrous as he fights for his life. In the final pages of “Duel,” Mann’s face is drawn abstractly and fluidly, with curving and cartoonish lines rather than the more realistic, starkly drawn lines of the comic’s beginning (Road Rage 102, 103) and as he cheers his victory, Mann’s face is dominated by the irregular oval of his screaming mouth, almost all other detail lost in the abstract lines of the rest of his face, dehumanized in his scream of rage and triumph. In contrast to the increasingly abstract visual style of “Duel,” “Throttle” has a realistic style, characterized by Daniel’s straight lines, which give the truck, bikes, and even the faces of The Tribe a gritty and life-like feel. As Ryan K. Lindsay writes in his review of the first installment, Daniel’s art- work features “astoundingly pretty line work with gritty colors. The artist is not afraid to push readers out of their comfort zone, delivering action and horror on an incredible scale.” While “Duel” has a color-scheme characterized by warm yellows, oranges, and dark black shadows, the color palette of “Throttle” starts out in cool blues and grays. “Duel” is a nearly mythical struggle of the hunter and the hunted, drawn in broad strokes and steeped in symbolism, from the Everyman naming of Mann to the physical equating of the trucker with his machine. In contrast, “Throttle” is strongly grounded in reality and rather than the black and white of clearly defined good and evil in “Duel,” the characters of “Throttle” occupy a more highly charged and violently contested range of grays. The Tribe are not heroes: the majority of them have criminal records, they had set up and were poised to profit from a meth lab, and when the meth lab exploded, Race and Roy brutally murdered Clarke and his girlfriend. However, The Tribe are family, a group of men willing to die or kill for one another and early descriptions in King and Hill’s story highlight their humanity, their camaraderie, and their fierce loyalty to one another; as Vince reflects, “It had been different on the way down to see Clarke. Better. The Tribe had stopped just after sunup at a diner much like this, and while the mood had not been festive, there had been plenty of bullshit, and a certain amount of predictable yuks to go with the coffee and the donuts” (King and Hill, “Throttle” 26). King and Hill look beyond the stereotype of the big, bad biker gang and while The Tribe is far from redeemed, they become humanized and as a result, the reader is able to understand and empathize with Vince’s loss. As Lind- say argues, this characterization works to “sell the efficiency of Hill and King’s homage, making readers really care about the characters and their final moments. Like any great horror tale, half the issue works on investing the reader in characters and set up, while the other half slowly dis- mantles this investment.” After all, a reader can’t care about what happens 168 TEACHING STEPHEN KING to a character unless they are emotionally invested in that character in the first place, which is essential in fully realizing Vince’s grief and vengeance. As King and Hill write, “Vince had never lost so much so fast, six of The Tribe dead on a stretch of road less than half a mile long. You didn’t do that to a man’s family, he thought, and drive away” (“Throttle” 47). Similarly, Keller, the rage-fueled truck driver who picks The Tribe off one by one, is more than a faceless monster. As Vince pulls up alongside the truck, he sees the honor roll sticker on the semi’s dust-coated bumper and realizes the truth: “It was madness, but not incomprehensible madness” (King and Hill, “Throttle” 48, emphasis original). The common ground of the two sides is highlighted in the graphic novel in a long, narrow panel dominated by the indistinct blacks and dark grays of the truck’s back end, with the honor roll sticker the only light-colored element and the focal point of the panel, which features a text box with a single word: “. . . family” (Road Rage 44). Concluding Vince’s thought from the previous panel—of The Tribe as his family—the ellipses here serves as both a connecting thread between Vince and the trucker and as a textually represented moment of realization. This violent interrogation of good guys and bad guys, “us” versus “them,” ripples outward among the surviving members of The Tribe as well, forever changing the already contentious relationship between Vince and Race, as Vince realizes his son knew the girl’s identity and the reason for the trucker’s rage all along, keeping his silence as their friends were killed around them. Standing above the flaming truck of their vanquished foe, instead of Mann’s primal scream of triumph, Vince is beaten and despondent with the realization that he “knew nothing about [the trucker], but felt suddenly that he liked him better than his own son. Such a thing should not have been possible, but there it was” (King and Hill, “Throttle” 53). The final showdown comes between Vince and Race, the graphic novel alternating between panels focusing on both of them together and those featuring each man individually as their conflict comes to a head (Road Rage 52–55) and as Race rides off down the road without looking back. One of the characteristic visual styles of “Throttle” that echoes this constant negotiation of the conflict is the widespread use of bleeds, which is “when a panel runs off the edge of the page” (McCloud,Understanding Comics 103). As McCloud explains, with bleeds, “Time is no longer contained by the familiar icon of the closed panel, but instead hemorrhages and escapes into timeless space” (ibid.). These bleeds are present from the very first page of the comic, as The Tribe pulls into the parking lot of a diner, and continue on nearly every page throughout the entirety of “Throttle,” under- scoring the scope of the story, the interconnection between the past and present, and the unresolved conflicts that hang over The Tribe and its members, especially within Vince and Race’s volatile relationship. While “Duel” GRAPHIC NOVELS 169 revolves around a clearly defined conflict—Mann versus the trucker—with a distinct beginning, middle, and end, much of the tension in “Throttle” comes from the larger, gradually established context and unfinished business, themes that are emphasized by the extensive use of these bleeds. As the trucker begins to run down The Tribe, nearly every page of the conflict features a bleed, whether of a full panel image or a smaller panel, with the images extending to the edges of the page, defying narrative containment just as The Tribe and the trucker refuse flat, categorical characterization. The bleeds are used to signify different narrative purposes at various points throughout the graphic novel: in the early pages, when The Tribe is pulling into the parking lot of a diner, the bleed signifies unfinished business, a conflict bubbling just under the surface as Vince and Race argue about what their next move should be (Road Rage 7). On the final page of the first issue, a full-page panel features Race with the truck’s bloody grille looming behind him, blotting out the sky, with the bleed highlighting Race’s separation from the rest of The Tribe’s surviving members and his eminent danger. As the conflict barrels toward its conclusion, the panels are occa- sionally more confined, such as a three-panel page focusing on the truck’s destruction as the tanker explodes and the cab skids off the road Road( Rage 49). Even with this conclusion reached, however, the connections and relationships cannot be so easily contained and in the graphic novel’s final pages, Race’s last look at his father bleeds off of the page Road( Rage 55), as does that featuring Vince and Lemmy waiting for the police and whatever comes next (Road Rage 56). In Road Rage, as in N. and The Little Green God of Agony, text and image work together to realize the literary elements of these stories by Matheson, King, and Hill, both showing and telling the reader about the characters, their relationships, and the horrors they face, both in others and within themselves. The graphic novel format is beginning to transcend mediums as well, as these three examples have shown, creating unique opportunities for storytelling through web series, web comics, and traditional graphic novels to provide readers a multi-textual way to engage with King’s ever- growing body of work. 12

Conclusion

n the more than four decades since King published his first novel, ICarrie, King has remained incredibly prolific, publishing more than fifty novels and short story collections, while also stretching beyond the boundaries of traditional publishing into serial publishing, ebooks, and graphic novels, as well as non-fiction, including his critical consideration of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), and the ebook exclusive Guns in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. He has even expanded into the musical realm, co-writing Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All (2013) along with his Rock Bottom Remainders bandmates, and working with John Mellencamp and T Bone Burnett as the playwright for the musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012). In recent years, King has also been active publishing in smaller venues, from literary publications such as Tin House, which published the short story “Afterlife” in 2013, to more mass market magazines like Esquire, which first published King and Hill’s “In the Tall Grass,” as well as King’s stories “Morality” in 2009 and “That Bus Is Another World” in 2014. While these stories—and other previously small-market published work—were eventually included in King’s 2015 collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, in a time when many print publications struggle to remain relevant in an increasingly online, e-format world, King’s work breathes a bit of life into the publication of literary magazines, reeling in the die-hard King fans hungry for his latest story. King continues to push the boundaries of publication, bringing his work to his Constant Readers in myriad ways, from traditional print and magazines to ebook and audiobook exclusives. King shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Between 2006 and 2014, “King’s output consist[ed] of 10 novels plus two story collections . . . [as well as] movie and TV adaptations, occasional columns for Entertain- ment Weekly and a tag-team story with novelist Joe Hill” (Spanberg), as 172 TEACHING STEPHEN KING well as the graphic novel adaptation of King and Hill’s “Throttle” in Road Rage. In 2015 alone, King published Finders Keepers (the sequel to the previous year’s Mr. Mercedes), the audiobook exclusive Drunken Fireworks, and the collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. With King’s prolific—and ever expanding—body of work, there are countless ways of incorporating King into the high school or college classroom, from a single short story to a single-author seminar. As the first section demonstrates, many of King’s works couple very effectively with classic works of horror literature, in his ongoing negotiation of traditional figures such as the vampire, werewolf, undead monster, and ghost. King’s short fiction also pairs well with Gothic staples to connect King’s contemporary work with the larger scope of the genre and its influence. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and King’s O. Henry Award-winning short story “The Man in the Black Suit” (originally published in The New Yorker in 1994 and later included in King’s collection Everything’s Eventual) both have strong themes of a young man’s journey into the woods, the horrors he discovers there, and the uncertainty of nightmare versus reality, though the truth each man discovers transcends this distinction. As the Real Life Horror section shows, King’s horror extends beyond the supernatural to reality-based horror, from school shootings and sexual violence to the turmoil of the adolescent coming of age. Rage can be read in tandem with King’s ebook Guns to spark conversation on school shootings, the relationship between popular culture and violence, censorship, and self-censorship. King has continued to write about sexual violence beyond Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, and Rose Madder, with his recent short stories and novellas “The Gingerbread Girl,” Big Driver, and A Good Marriage, which address these serious and troubling issues within the context of our contemporary culture. While the coming of age stories featured here end in varying degrees of disaster, the framework of the bildungsroman could be effectively expanded to explore the representation of children in many of King’s other works, from Firestarter to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Finally, King continues to experiment with various publication mediums, from age-old serial publishing to cutting edge ebook exclusives. For better or for worse, e-publication is changing and shaping the way we read, including what we read and how we engage with the text itself, and King’s work can be used to interrogate these issues, as well as the business of publication, the larger literary conversation, and students’ experiences as readers. The graphic novels inspired by King’s work, such as N., Little Green God of Agony, Road Rage, and even excerpts from larger graphic novel series like the Dark Tower series and The Stand provide an opportunity to discuss authorship, inspiration, and adaption, as each builds upon or brings a new twist to King’s original work. CONCLUSION 173

In addition to his published works, King has had a significant impact on popular culture, a further level of critical consideration that can be effectively incorporated into the classroom. Almost all of King’s prodigious body of work has been adapted for viewing, with many notable and award-winning big screen adaptations, like Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining (1980), Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990) with Kathy Bates’s Oscar- winning performance as the psychotic Annie Wilkes, and director Frank Darabont’s several adaptations of King works, including The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist (2007). King’s works have also been frequently adapted into television formats, including made-for-TV movies, miniseries, and limited run series, including miniseries versions of IT (1990), The Stand (1994), The Shining, and Bag of Bones (2011) and new, original for television works such as Storm of the Century (1999), Rose Red (2002), and Kingdom Hospital (2004). Just as King has explored unconventional publication formats, his adaptations have also negotiated their respective mediums, such as the limited run series Nightmares & Dream- scapes (2006), which featured ten individual stand-alone episodes based on some of King’s shorter works. On both the big and small screens, King adaptations have ranged from excellent to truly terrible. However, despite the varying quality of these films, there are several King adaptations, on both the big and small screens, that warrant serious critical consideration.1 Linda Constanzo Cahir’s Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches lays out a very useful set of terminology for addressing and analyzing adaptation, including the understanding of adaptation as “trans- lation,” which can run to the gamut from literal to traditional, and even radical reimaginings of the source material (16–17). By requiring students to look beyond a simple comparison and contrast that chronicles differences between the two versions, it becomes possible to look more deeply at adaptation choices and their impact on the work as a whole. For example, The Shining’s Wendy Torrance is characterized very differently in King’s novel, Kubrick’s film, and Garris’s miniseries, a shift which impacts not only the character herself, but the choices she makes and how she interacts with her husband and son, as well as how she responds to the supernatural horrors of the Overlook Hotel. In exploring these different representations, students can move beyond the simplistic (“that’s not how I pictured her when I read the book”) to Wendy’s varying levels of agency, representations of feminism, and anxiety surrounding images of powerful women. King’s work has also entered the wider popular culture lexicon, so instantly recognizable to the contemporary audience that complex stories can be communicated in shorthand, including “The Shinning” segment of The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror V” (1994) episode and the “Three Kings” episode of Family Guy (2009), which parodies Misery, The 174 TEACHING STEPHEN KING

Shawshank Redemption, and The Body/Stand By Me, both of which expand the discussion of King’s work to include adaptation, humor, and parody. Both The Simpsons and Family Guy are dynamically intertextual series, making regular references and homages to a wide variety of cultural predecessors, including literature, music, Hollywood musicals, and classic film, and while the series can certainly be enjoyable without the viewer being in on all of these jokes, this engaged understanding of the references being made only enhances the viewing experience. As Mallory Carra wrote of seeing Kubrick’s The Shining as a first-year film student and seasoned Simp- sons fan, “what I never realized about it is that The Simpsons parody of The Shining is so spot on. When I finally did watch The Shining . . . I couldn’t believe how many moments I recognized and how much my viewing actually enhanced the humor of The Simpsons sendup.” While many students are familiar with The Simpsons and Family Guy, watching these episodes anew with King’s work fresh in their minds creates a critically engaged return to the material, with an awareness of the combination of literature, film adaptation, television, and these influences and interconnections. King’s work has shaped both landscapes of American literature and popular culture and, in recent years, has begun to make its way into high school and college literature classrooms. While selections need to be carefully made to fit the reading and maturity level of the students—for example, many of King’s novels feature violence and sexual content that may be unsuited for younger readers—there are multiple advantages to teaching the works of Stephen King. His characters are often complex and three- dimensional, his settings tap into the familiar scenery of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and he tackles weighty themes of life and death, family, faith, community, loss, violence, and addiction. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, King’s novels are but a single cog in the larger machinery of literary history and contemporary popular culture, drawing on the works that have preceded them in their themes and epigraphs, as well as inspiring a gamut of popular responses, from adaptation to parody. By reading and critically discussing King, students can be introduced to literature as an active, responsive body of work, dynamically engaged with what has come before and what will follow after, as well as King’s explicit engagement with the world around him, from brand name references to the incorporation of popular literature, film, and television. In seeing the ways in which King’s fiction is part of a larger system, students are encouraged to engage not just with King’s work but with the literary tradition as a whole, as well as the ways in which that literature impacts their daily lives and the world around them. King’s work continues to have a finger on the pulse of its surrounding culture, from its greatest joys to its deepest anxieties, without ever losing sight of the larger underlying questions of CONCLUSION 175 what it means to love, to fear, and to be human. By bringing King into the classroom, we can encourage our students to carefully read and respond to this literature on multiple levels, from the initial personal and emotional response of effective fiction, to the critical analysis of literary elements, and at the highest level of critical engagement, the grand unifying themes of the human experience. Notes

Chapter 1

1. Allen’s choice of Dickens as the “literary” in contrast to King’s populist is interesting, as there have been comparisons between King and Dickens drawn throughout much of King’s career, including Dickens’s long-time dismissal by his contemporary critics as a populist writer pandering to his audience. As fellow writer Peter Straub comments in Jane Ciabattari’s “Is Stephen King a Great Writer?”, King’s “readership is even larger and more inclusive and the similarities between King and Dickens, always visible to those who cared for King’s work, have become all but unavoidable. Both are novelists of vast popularity and enormous bibliographies, both are beloved writers with a pronounced taste for the morbid and grotesque, both display a deep interest in the underclass” (qtd. in Ciabattari).

Chapter 2

1. The theme of small town secrets is a familiar one for King, a central factor in several of his books. In addition to Jerusalem’s Lot, some of King’s other notable small towns include Castle Rock, Derry, and Haven, all of which are fictional towns in King’s Maine and the settings of several of his novels. 2. Chapter 11 focuses exclusively on King and graphic novels, including an overview of graphic novel conventions and terminology.

Chapter 3

1. As Charlotte F. Otten outlines the outcome of Grenier’s case, “The court, recognizing his mental aberration and limited intelligence, sentenced him to life in a monastery for moral and religious instruction. He died there at age twenty, scarcely human” (9). Other accused werewolves weren’t so lucky and often “the rudimentary proceedings and the mass executions bore something of the same hysteria as such manifestations of the Salem witch trials” (Copper 27). 2. Cycle of the Werewolf’s structure is also unique in that King originally imagined it as text to accompany a calendar, as a series of 12 monthly vignettes, echoing the lunar pattern of the werewolf’s transformation at the coming of the full moon. 178 NOTES

3. LeBay’s brother has his doubts about the nature of these deaths, however. When Dennis pushes George LeBay for the rest of the story, George tells him that after his daughter’s death, “Veronica wrote Marcia a letter and hinted that Rollie had made no real effort to save their daughter. And that, at the very end, he put her back in the car. So she would be out of the sun, he said, but in her letter, Veronica said she thought Rollie wanted her to die in the car” (Christine 433), a choice Dennis interprets as an act of “human sacrifice” (ibid.). George also has his doubts about his sister-in-law’s suicide, telling Dennis “I’ve often wondered why she would do it the way she did—and I’ve wondered how a woman who didn’t know the slightest thing about cars would know enough to get the hose and attach it to the exhaust pipe and put it through the window. I try not to wonder about those things. They keep me awake at night” (Christine 434). Beyond the many literal ghosts that populate Christine, George LeBay is haunted by these unanswered questions, just as Dennis will be haunted by the myriad ways in which he was unable to save Arnie. 4. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, with schizophrenia, “People with the disorder may hear voices other people don’t hear. They may believe other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts, or plotting to harm them. This can terrify people with the illness and make them withdrawn or extremely agitated” (“What Is Schizophrenia?”). While the effects of schizophrenia can include hallucinations and delusions, in truth schizophrenics don’t usually experience the multiple personalities exhibited by Mort Rainey. 5. The second book of King’s Dark Tower series,The Drawing of the Three (1987), features another complex dissociative character in Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker, whose “two personalities—the sophisticated and wealthy Odetta and the uneducated and vulgar Detta—lead separate lives, completely unaware of each other” (Strengell 72). 6. King keeps the supernatural possibility alive as well, as at least a partial explanation. A witness tells Amy about seeing Mort talking to Shooter: “according to what Sonny says, Tom looked in his rear-view mirror and saw another man with Mort, and an old station wagon, though neither the man nor the car had been there ten seconds before . . . [B]ut you could see right through him, and the car, too” (Secret Window 380, emphasis original). 7. Rage is discussed at length in Chapter Six. 8. Many readers and critics wondered why King had chosen to publish under a pseudonym, when his own name and work had begun to be so well known and popular and this is a question he addressed in his introduction to the collected Bachman Books, in an essay titled “Why I Was Bachman.” One of the main reasons he discusses is, in fact, to directly counter the fame he had already achieved early in his career. As King says, “I think I did it to turn the heat down a little bit; to do something as someone other than Stephen King. I think that all novelists are inveterate role-players and it was fun to be someone else for a while—in this case, Richard Bachman” (“Why I Was Bachman” viii). He addressed this question from another angle and in further detail on the “Fre- quently Asked Questions” section of his official website, where he says that “I NOTES 179

did that because back in the early days of my career there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept [from an author] but I think that a number of writers have disproved that by now . . . [Writing as Bachman] made it possible for me to do two books in one year. I just did them under different names and eventually the public got wise to this because you can change your name but you can’t really disguise your style.”

Chapter 4

1. This argument appears in the novel’s preface, which bore Shelley’s name but was in actuality written by her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2. When the dying Pascow begins speaking of the pet sematary, however, Louis finds it much more difficult to maintain his professional distance, nearly fainting (Pet Sematary 75). Throughout the novel, Pascow continues to refuse the easy categorization of living/dead that Louis imposes upon him, appearing to Louis in a dream of the pet sematary and the woods beyond (Pet Sematary 83–87) and later to warn Ellie (Pet Sematary 314). 3. In a nod to Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mary’s mother’s maiden name is Shelley (Revival 358) and Mary has a son named Victor, who Jacobs says will be well taken care of after her death, as payment for her willing participation (Revival 361). 4. As Nell Greenfieldboyce explains, though many people think immediately of “the scenes from the classic horror films, which show Victor Frankenstein in a storm, using lightning bolts to jumpstart his creation as he cries ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’ … You won’t find that dramatic scene in Mary Shelley’s book.” While Shelley refers to the rain outside and Victor’s decision to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (51), there is no dramatic lightning strike at this moment of creation, though storms and lightning feature predominantly elsewhere in Shelley’s novel. 5. Several of King’s other works take inspiration from Lovecraft as well, including his novella The Mist (included in Skeleton Crew, 1985) and the stories “Jerusa- lem’s Lot” (in Night Shift) and “Crouch End” (in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993). Lovecraft’s inspiration can also be seen in King and Hill’s In the Tall Grass, which is discussed in Chapter 10 on ebooks.

Chapter 5

1. The zombie permutation of the undead monster is an exception to this tradition, as discussed in the previous chapter. 2. In “‘Truth Comes Out’: The Scrapbook Chapter,” Tony Magistrale argues that King positions readers uniquely alongside Jack as he pages through the scrapbook, implicating the readers themselves in the fascination with and hauntings perpetrated by the hotel. As Magistrale writes, the “third-person narrative perspective . . . helps to create a sensation in the reader of peering over Torrance’s shoulder as he reads along, even pausing with him to consider the implications 180 NOTES

of what is revealed. We become co-conspirators with Jack, involved in a subtle collusion that is so compelling because it delves into a yet undisclosed record of evil” (41). 3. Garris has directed several King adaptations for television movie and miniseries format, including The Stand (1994), Desperation (2006), and Bag of Bones (2011). Garris also directed the film adaptation of Riding the Bullet (2004), which had limited theatrical release. 4. Nearly a century has passed since Sara’s rape and murder when Mike begins asking his questions. Much has changed in the TR-90, though this pervasive racism remains, ugly and persistent, acting as an excuse for those who know the TR’s troubling history. Before Mike starts digging into this dark past, he considers his caretaker Bill Dean one of his closest friends, a man who will always tell him the truth and speak straight with him. However, when Bill confronts Mike about his late wife’s research, he tells Mike that Sara and the Red-Tops “were just . . . just wanderers . . . from away” (387). Mike hears what Bill says, as well as what he doesn’t say: as Mike knows instinctively, in one more side effect of “the zone,” Bill “hesitated in the middle of his thought, substituting wanderers for the word which had come naturally to mind. Niggers was the word he hadn’t said. Sara and those others were just niggers from away” (King 388, emphasis original). The racism that motivated Jared and his men’s murder of Sara still influences the life of the TR, if more covertly than in its earlier incarnation.

Chapter 6

1. First editions of Rage as a stand-alone novel are much harder to come by. As Business Insider’s Cory Adwar explains, “In BookFinder.com’s list of the 100 most sought-after out-of-print books of 2013, Rage is ranked higher than any other novel, at number two overall. Used copies of the first printing paperback are currently on sale online for anywhere between $700 and upwards of $2,000” (Adwar). King is well represented further down this list as well, with his “My Pretty Pony” (1989), which was part of a Whitney Museum of Ameri- can Art series limited edition, at Number 3 and his standalone novella The Body (which is also included in the 1982 collection Different Seasons) at Num- ber 16 (“11th Annual BookFinder.com Report”). In the 2014 BookFinder.com list, Rage dropped to Number 5 and “My Pretty Pony” fell to Number 22; The Body rose to Number 4 and King’s The Colorado Kid was added to the list at Number 6, securing King three of the top ten spots in the 2014 list (Carswell). 2. Chokshi’s article points out the significant debate over what counts as a school shooting, which the research cited in Chokshi’s story defined as “any instance of a firearm discharging on school property . . . thus casting a broad net that includes homicides, suicides, accidental discharges and, in a handful of cases, shootings that had no relation to the schools themselves and occurred with no students apparently present” (Chokshi). This question of definition, methodology, and quantification highlights just “how difficult quantifying gun violence can be” (Chokshi), though doing so is a first—and foundational—step in addressing and NOTES 181

responding to this violence. As Chokshi summarized the research data of these 74 incidents, 20 of these resulted in at least one victim being fatally injured, while 53 resulted in victim injuries, with overall totals of 36 students injured and 10 killed (ibid.). In terms of location, “35 shootings took place at a college or university; 39 shootings took place at a school that teaches grades K-12” (ibid.). While there are still many instances of “traditional,” Columbine-style school shootings, this seems to show that schools have frequently been the site of other types of violent incidents in recent years. 3. This speech is available in its entirety online, both in video and transcript formats. 4. See Chapter Ten for a more extensive discussion of King’s ebook publication of both fiction and non-fiction works, including Guns.

Chapter 7

1. However, it should be noted that some of the essays included in this collection argue on behalf of the increasing strength and complexity of King’s female characters, including Carol A. Senf’s “Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne: Stephen King and the Evolution of an Authentic Female Narrative Voice.” 2. Characters who hear voices in their heads are frequent in King’s fiction, especially when those characters have suffered significant trauma. InGerald’s Game, Jessie hears the voice of Ruth and the status quo-reinforcing imprecations of a persona she refers to as Goodwife Burlingame, though she knows these are all variations of her own voice and her own thoughts, rather than external or potentially schizophrenic intrusions. As Senf argues, “Jessie’s decision to listen to her own inner voice rather than to the voices that she hears around her and her decision to take charge of her life, come at the end of the novel and indicate Jessie’s growing realization of her own strength. Listening to others is a form of victimization. Having allowed herself to be victimized by both her parents and her husband, she decides that she will not continue to be a victim” (“Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne” 98). This is a theme that carries through other of King’s works that feature sexual violence as well. For example, in King’s rape- revenge novella Big Driver, published in the collection Full Dark, No Stars, Tess hears voices as she recovers from her rape and decides to get revenge on her rapist, including investing her GPS and her cat Fritz with voices of their own. In A Good Marriage, another novella included in Full Dark, No Stars, Darcy discovers that her husband is a sadistic serial killer, who rapes, tortures, and murders women; as she struggles to cope with this horrifying discovery, she divides herself into different elements of her identity, separately referring to them as “Smart Darcy,” “Stupid Darcy,” and “The Darker Girl.” Finally, in King’s story “The Gingerbread Girl,” when Emily faces the threat of rape and murder, she hears her father’s voice in her head, instructing her as she works to escape. In each of these cases, as well as in Gerald’s Game, the female characters acknowl- edge that these voices are variations of their own, designed to help them cope with, endure, and survive the trauma at hand. 182 NOTES

3. This reference echoes the song “Really Rosie,” featured in a short animated film of the same name, with music and lyrics by Maurice Sendak, who is best known for the 1963 children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are.

Chapter 8

1. King’s epic novel IT is a coming of age story on a grand scale, centered on a group of seven 11-year-old children who battle the monstrous horror feeding upon Derry, then are called back once again as adults twenty-seven years later. IT can be a challenge to incorporate into the classroom, given its prodigious length of more than one thousand pages, though it could be productively included through excerpts or within a structure in which students individually self-select which King works they would like to read. 2. As Campbell explains in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return” (Campbell 30, emphasis original). Within this formula, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellowman” (30). 3. The Body and Carrie can be effectively put into conversation with one another in their common theme of adolescent vengeance; as Linda Badley argues in “Stephen King Viewing the Body,” “‘The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan’ is Carrie in drag” (165). Bodily fluids and abjection are another uniting theme between these two teens who’ve been pushed too far, with vomit in “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan” echoing the significance of blood inCarrie . 4. Blood is a powerful theme throughout the novel as a whole, signaling both maturation and abjection, with the coming of Carrie’s period, the pigs’ blood Sue and Billy dump on Carrie at the prom, the bloodshed of Carrie’s rampage, and with Sue Snell in the novel’s final pages, the coming of blood that can arguably be interpreted as either a late-arriving period or a miscarriage. 5. This conclusion has led many critics to criticize Carrie White among King’s representations of monstrous and one-dimensional female characters. For example, as Shelley Stamp Lindsey writes of DePalma’s film version of Car- rie, “Not only is Carrie a female monster, but sexual difference is integral to the horror she generates; monstrosity is explicitly associated with menstruation and female sexuality” (284). This critical response also positions Carrie effectively in the conversation surrounding King’s other representations of female characters and violence against women, discussed in the previous chapter. 6. Adolescent and high school bullying is still a serious issue and this theme is likely one of the reasons that Carrie continues to be so powerful, particularly among young adult readers. The face of bullying has changed significantly from 1974 to now, including the influence of social media, though the emotional trauma remains largely unchanged. In her 2013 film adaptation of NOTES 183

Carrie, director Kimberly Peirce—who also directed Boys Don’t Cry (1999), which focused on the harassment and murder of transgender teen Brandon Teena—highlighted the significance and potentially deadly impacts of bullying. As Jamie Frevele writes in the article “Kimberly Peirce’s Remake of Carrie Will Have an Anti-Bullying Message” for the website The Mary Sue, Carrie is “a typical revenge story, but for many teenagers who are bullied for lesser reasons than being (let’s admit this to ourselves) a total freak, it might hit close to home. Especially now that a very bright spotlight has been put on standing up to bullying and supporting bullied kids so they don’t do something harmful to themselves or others” (Frevele). In addition to touching a chord with bullied teens, Peirce’s film also modernized the context of Carrie’s bullying, with Chris using her phone to record a video of the locker room attack, then posting it to the Internet and projecting it on a large screen at the prom, using technological as well as face-to-face tactics to torment Carrie.

Chapter 9

1. King briefly mentions both of these examples in his foreword to The Two Dead Girls (vii). 2. There was, of course, always the potential for failure. Some of King’s stories have a habit of getting away from him, as his longer books like The Stand and Under the Dome illustrate, which could have left King with a story too big for the format he had chosen. In addition, while The Green Mile was very successful, his attempts at serialization have not always been. A few years later in 2000, King put individual installments of a novel in progress, The Plant—which he had actually begun writing in the 1980s—up on his website, with readers paying one dollar per segment on the honor system (“The Plant: Zenith Rising”). However, after six installments, King stopped writing. The fact that few readers were paying on the honor system may have contributed to this decision; as Gwendolyn Mariano writes, “by the fourth installment, paid readers had dipped to 46 percent of all downloads, according to King’s assistant, Marsha DeFilippo. She added, however, that King had decided to put ‘The Plant’ aside before he had the final figures for his fourth installment.” As his website says, “The novel has not yet been completed. If the inspiration does return, at some time in the future this project will be completed but the format for its publication may be different” (“The Plant: Zenith Rising”). 3. O’Sullivan contextualizes Darabont’s 1999 film adaptation of The Green Mile within this larger context of films about capital punishment and the death penalty, including Dead Man Walking (1995), Last Dance (1996), and The Chamber (1996). O’Sullivan draws particularly strong parallels between The Green Mile and Dead Man Walking, which could form the foundation of an interesting comparison and contrast analysis: “Frank Darabont name checks Dead Man Walking in several ways. Tim Robbins who directed Dead Man Walking is perhaps best known for his starring role in Darabont’s Shawshank Redemption . . . [and] Early on in the film death-row inmate John Coffey is 184 NOTES

brought onto the mile accompanied by the hail of ‘dead man walking, dead man walking’” (O’Sullivan 492–493). King’s novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is also a fascinating possibility for critical comparison and contrast, with the shared themes of incarceration, wrongfully imprisoned men, justice, and the uplifting notions of transcendence and hope. 4. While this literary and cinematic trope has a long history, including the “Uncle Tom” figure discussed by Kent, its contemporary meaning can be identified beginning with 1950s discussions of the filmThe Defiant Ones (1958), starring Tony Curtis as John “Joker” Jackson and Sidney Poitier as Noah Cullen, who are escaped convicts, chained together and at odds with one another, not least of all because of their difference in race; however, “in the end, after many trials and tribulations, they become friends . . . [Later] Cullen sacrifices his own freedom to help Joker. And so the first famous Magical Negro was born” (Okorafor-Mbachu). The conversation surrounding the “Magical Negro” got new life in 2001 when director Spike Lee addressed it, re-coining film characters such as Michael Clarke Duncan’s John Coffey in The Green Mile and Will Smith’s Bagger Vance in The Legend of Bagger Vance as “Super-Duper Magi- cal Negro[es]” (Okorafor-Mbachu), addressing the “absurdity of the magical Negro characters” (Glenn and Cunningham 138). 5. In Hollywood’s Stephen King, Magistrale points out that “The fact that he was not immediately lynched by the mob in the very woods where he is discovered is more surprising than his perceived association with the rape and murder of the two white girls” (140). This possibility is also in keeping with the racial tenor of the Depression era where “Racial violence again became more common, especially in the South. Lynchings, which had declined to eight in 1932 surged to 28 in 1933” (“Great Depression and World War II”). 6. In the film adaptation, Paul asks Coffey this question, who then goes on to absolve Paul, forgiving him for what he must do. 7. The 2014 collectionSerialization in Popular Culture, edited by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg, contextualizes serialization historically and also includes several excellent critical articles on contemporary serialized media, with sections on “Serialization on Screen,” “Serialization in Comic Books and Graphic Novels,” and “Digital Serialization.” 8. Plympton is a “curated mobile reading service” dedicated to providing readers with serial fiction and reading options on the go. As the homepage of their website explains, Plympton’s “mission is to push the edge in what the next generation of great storytelling should be in the digital age” (“Plympton. A Literary Studio”). 9. King’s wide range of e-reader exclusive publications is discussed at length in the following chapter.

Chapter 10

1. Wesley, as most humans would, finds the opportunity to interfere and change the course of the future irresistible, breaking established “Paradox Laws,” which sets him on a collision course with King’s “low men in yellow coats” NOTES 185

and the meta-universe of King’s fiction that revolves around The Dark Tower. As they tell Wesley, “The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses” (UR, ch. 7). 2. While there is a pronounced preference for e-readers and electronic rather than standard print versions of texts among many students, popularity does not necessarily translate into effective learning. As Ziming Liu explains in Paper to Digital: Documents in the Information Age, according to recent research, “nearly 80% of students prefer to read a digital piece of text in print in order to understand the text with clarity. Nearly 68% of the respondents report that they understand and retain more information when they read print media” (54). Readers also engage with electronic texts differently than print texts, including in annotation and note-taking habits. As Liu reports, according to another study, “nearly 54% of the participants ‘always’ or ‘frequently’ annotate printed documents, compared to approximately 11% [who] ‘always’ or ‘frequently’ annotate electronic documents” (61). 3. King’s recent collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015) includes several of these works that were previously ebook exclusive publications, including Mile 81 and UR. 4. Both Christine and From a Buick 8 (2002) feature cars with supernatural powers, though of a very different sort. King includes a wink to these earlier works in Mile 81, when he says that “Jimmy Golding hadn’t believed in monster cars since he saw that movie Christine as a kid, but he believed that sometimes monsters could lurk in cars” (Mile 81, ch. 5, emphasis original). 5. O’Nan’s recent novels include Wish You Were Here (2007), Last Night at the Lobster (2008), Emily, Alone (2011), The Odds: A Love Story (2012), and West of Sunset (2015). 6. Hill has published several best-selling horror novels, including Heart-Shaped Box (2007), Horns (2010), and N0S482 (2012), as well as a Bram Stoker Award- winning short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts (2005), and the Locke and Key graphic novel series. Like King, Hill has also embraced the unique opportunities of e-publication with several Kindle Singles, including Thumbprint (2012), Twittering from the Circus of the Dead (2013), By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain (2014), and Wolverton Station (2014). 7. Guns is also discussed at length in Chapter Six, which focuses in part on King’s novella Rage and its connection to school shootings. 8. The opposite is also a significant problem, with unscrupulous authors creating fake accounts to post positive reviews of their own books in the hope of driving future sales (Charman-Anderson).

Chapter 11

1. Hill has extensive independent graphic novel experience as well, with his standalone graphic novel The Cape (2012), the Locke & Key series, and graphic novel adaptations of his 2013 novel N0S482, including The Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland (2014). 186 NOTES

2. GetGraphic.org, a website developed by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, has a concise PDF of “Some Graphic Novel Basics” that covers basic terminology and reading strategies for graphic novels, with examples. It can be found under their resources for teachers, with the link “How to Read a Graphic Novel.” 3. King is credited as creative director and executive director of the graphic novel.

Chapter 12

1. Several excellent books have been written on King’s Hollywood adaptations, including Magistrale’s Hollywood’s Stephen King. There are a handful of other critical works on film adaptations of King, includingThe Films of Stephen King: From Carrie to Secret Window (edited by Magistrale), as well as more fan-based books, like Stephen Jones’s Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide. Works Cited

“11th Annual BookFinder.com Report: Out-of-print and in demand.” BookFinder. com. BookFinder.com, 1997–2014. Web. 22 June 2015. 28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston. Twentieth Century Fox, 2002. The Advocates for Human Rights. “Shelters and Safehouses.” StopVAW.org. The Advocates for Human Rights, 2010. Web. 22 June 2015. Adwar, Corey. “This Stephen King Novel Will Never Be Printed Again After It Was Tied To School Shootings.” Business Insider. Business Insider Inc., 1 Apr. 2014. Web. 22 June 2015. Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, Mike Perkins, and Laura Martin. The Stand: American Nightmares. New York: Marvel, 2010. Print. ———. The Stand: Captain Trips. New York: Marvel, 2010. Print. ———. The Stand: The Night Has Come. New York: Marvel, 2013. Print. Allen, Dwight. “My Stephen King Problem: A Snob’s Notes.” Los Angeles Review of Books. Los Angeles Review of Books, 3 July 2012. Web. 23 June 2015. Allen, Rob, and Thijs van den Berg. “Introduction.”Serialization in Popular Culture. (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies). Eds. Rob Allen and Thijs vanden Berg. New York: Routledge, 2014: 1–7. Print. Alter, Alexandra. “The Return of the Serial Novel.”Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal, 11 Apr. 2013. Web. 22 June 2015. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, IL: University Chicago Press, 1995. Print. Badley, Linda. “Stephen King Viewing the Body.” Stephen King. (Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 1998: 163–190. Print. Bag of Bones. Dir. Mick Garris. Perf. Pierce Brosnan, Melissa George, Annabeth Gish, Caitlin Carmichael, Anika Noni Rose. A&E, 2011. Bailey, Dale. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Print. Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth- Century Writing. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1987. Print. Bauder, David. “Violent Movies, TV Shows & Games Questioned after Sandy Hook Shooting.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc., 21 Dec. 2012. Web. 22 June 2015. 188 WORKS CITED

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A Blade, 13 addiction, 50, 51, 62–63, 64, 65, Blaze, 38, 73, 79. See also Bachman, 106, 174 Richard The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bloch, Robert, 52 122. See also Twain, Mark Blockade Billy, 145 “Afterlife,” 171 The Body, 6, 103, 104–108, 112, 117, Albuquerque, Rafael, 6, 21, 22, 23, 24 174, 180n1, 182n3 aliens, 43 “The Bogeyboys,” 78–80, 84 American Vampire (series), 21, 24 The Bonfire of the Vanities, 122. See also American Vampire, Volume 1, 6, Wolfe, Tom 21–25, 153. See also Snyder, Scott; The Book of the Dead, 59 Albuquerque, Rafael Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 12–13 “An Ancient Ghost Story,” 59. See also Burnett, T Bone, 171. See also Pliny the Younger Ghost Brothers of Darkland Anna Karenina, 122. See also Tolstoy, Leo County Apt Pupil, 6, 103, 108–112, 117 Arrested Development, 135 C audiobooks, 171, 172 Calero, Denis, 161–162, 163–164. See author characters, 36 also Little Green God of Agony Gordie Lachance, 104–108, 117 (webcomic) Jack Torrance, 60–65, 179n2 “The Call of Cthulhu,” 54, 148, 157. Mike Noonan, 65–70, 180n2 See also Cthulhu mythos; Mort Rainy, 36–38, 178n4, 178n6 Lovecraft, H. P. Thad Beaumont, 38–41 Campbell, Joseph, 104, 182n2. See also mythic hero B capital punishment, 124, 126–129, 131, Bachman, Richard, 6, 38, 73, 79, 178n8 132, 133, 183n3 Bag of Bones (miniseries), 173, 180n3 Carmilla (novel), 12. See also le Fanu, Bag of Bones (novel), 6, 41, 61, 65–70 Sheridan Bates, Kathy, 173 Carrie (film, 1976), 182n6 Bazaar of Bad Dreams, 171, 172, 185n3 Carrie (film, 2013), 104, 182–183n6 Big Driver, 88, 172, 181n2 Carrie (novel), 2, 3, 6, 7, 103, 112–117, bildungsroman, 6, 103, 104, 205, 112, 171, 182nn3–5 115, 172 The Castle of Otranto, 59. See also Blackwater, 122. See also McDowell, Walpole, Horace Michael Castle Rock, 105, 108, 177n1 206 INDEX

Cell, 6, 46, 54–58 The Defiant Ones, 184n4 The Chamber, 183n3 Desperation (novel), 38, 144. See also child abuse, 14, 62, 64, 88, 90, 91–94, Bachman, Richard; The Regulators 98, 106–107, 143 Desperation (TV movie), 180n3 children, 15, 17, 18, 34, 40, 43, 46–49, Derry, 43, 177n1, 182n1 50, 57, 60–65, 66, 67, 68, 103, Dickens, Charles, 3, 105, 121–122, 123, 104–108, 111, 116, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 177n1. See also 144–145, 145–146, 147–148, A Christmas Carol 182n1 Different Seasons (collection), 6, 103, “Children of the Corn” (film 126, 180n1 franchise), 1 direct address narration, 18, 89 “Children of the Corn” (short story), Disney, 98, 116 146–147 dissociative identity disorder, 37–38, Christianity, 17–18, 50–51, 99, 113, 178n5 114, 126, 129, 132–133 Doctor Sleep, 4, 61, 65 Christine (film), 185n4 Dolores Claiborne, 6, 87, 88–95, 96, Christine (novel), 6, 31, 34–36, 41, 58, 172, 181n1, 181n2 112, 178n3, 185n4 domestic violence, 2, 6, 52, 63, 64, 88, A Christmas Carol (book), 59. See also 91–92, 95–96, 97, 99 Dickens, Charles Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 28–31, 34, 39, “Cinderella,” 98, 116 96. See also Stevenson, Robert Columbine, 76, 77, 80, 81, 180–81n2 Louis coming of age, 6, 103–117, 172, 182n1. Dracula, 6, 12, 13–17, 20, 22. See also See also bildungsroman Stoker, Bram; Van Helsing cosmic horror, 52–54, 147–148, The Drawing of the Three, 178n5. 157, 160 See also Dark Tower (book series) “Crouch End,” 179n5 Dreamcatcher, 43 Cthulhu mythos, 54, 148, 157 “Drunken Fireworks,” 172 Cujo, 3, 43, 89 duality, 27–41, 96 Cycle of the Werewolf, 6, 31, 32–34, “Duel” (comic), 153, 165–167, 41, 177n2 168–169. See also “Duel” (short story); Hill, Joe; Matheson, D Richard; Road Rage; “Throttle” Daniel, Nelson, 165. See also Road “Duel” (short story), 153, 164–166, Rage 168–169. See also Hill, Joe; Danse Macabre, 5, 13, 27, 59, 147, 171 Matheson, Richard; Road Rage; Darabont, Frank, 1, 129, 173, “Throttle” 183–184n3 The Dark Half, 6, 31, 36, 38–41 E Dark Tower (book series), 3, 153–154, ebooks, 7, 121, 134–135, 137–151, 171, 178n5, 184–185n1 181n4, 185n2, 185n3, 185n6 Dark Tower (graphic novel series), E.C. comics, 13 153–154, 172 Edgar Award, 2 Dead Man Walking, 183n3 Eliot, George, 122. See also The Dead Zone, 3, 43 Middlemarch INDEX 207 epistolary style, 14–15, 76, 139, A Good Marriage, 88, 172, 181n2 156–157, 159 Gothic tradition, 5–6, 11, 13, 25, 28, Erinyes, 100–101 30, 31, 38, 43, 55, 63, 66, 67, Everything’s Eventual, 138, 172 68–69, 70, 172 Grandmaster status, 1–2 F graphic novels, 7, 13, 21–25, 121, A Face in the Crowd, 7, 145–146. 133, 146, 153–169, 171, 172, See also O’Nan, Stuart 177n2, 185n1, 186n2, 186n3. fairy tales, 98, 116. See also See also American Vampire, “Cinderella”; “Hansel and Gretel”; Volume 1; The Dark Tower; “Snow White” Little Green God of Agony; “N.”; Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Road Rage; The Stand Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 The Great God Pan (novel), 52–53. Season, 145. See also O’Nan, See also Machen, Arthur Stewart Greek mythology, 98–101, 158 Family Guy, 173–174 The Green Mile (film), 1, 127–128, Finders Keepers, 172 129, 173, 183n1, 183n3, Finney, Jack, 46. See also Invasion of 184nn4–5 the Body Snatchers (novel) The Green Mile (novel), 7, 121–135, Firestarter, 144, 172 183n3, 184n5 Flaubert, Gustave, 122. See also Guggenheim, Marc, 158–160. See also Madame Bovary Stephen King’s N. Four Past Midnight, 36 gun control, 80, 84, 149 Frankenstein, 6, 12, 43–46, 50, 52, Guns, 7, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83–84, 140, 53–54, 55, 179n3. See also 148–151, 171, 172, 181n4, 185n7 Shelley, Mary frauroman, 112 H Freud, Sigmund, 27–28, 32. See also Hamlet, 59. See also Shakespeare, structural theory of personality William From a Buick 8, 185n4 “Hansel and Gretel,” 98 Full Dark, No Stars, 88, 181 Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All, 171. G See also Rock Bottom Remainders Garres, Rafa, 165. See also Road Rage Harris, Charlane, 13, 21. See also Garris, Mick, 64, 173, 180n3 Sookie Stackhouse series; Gerald’s Game, 6, 87, 88–95, 96, 172, True Blood 181n1, 181n2 Harry Potter, 133 Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, 171 haunted houses, 59, 60–70 ghosts, 4, 11, 59–70, 73, 146, 178n6 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 50, 172. See also “The Gingerbread Girl,” 87–88, 172, “Young Goodman Brown” 181n2 Hill, Joe, 7, 140, 146–148, 153, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon 164–169, 171–172, 179n5, 185n1. (pop–up book), 145 See also In the Tall Grass; The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Road Rage; “Throttle” (novel), 145, 172 The Hobbit, 133. See also Tolkien, J.R.R. 208 INDEX

Homer, 59, 100. See also Illiad; Odyssey The Long Walk, 38, 73. See also The Hunger Games, 133 Bachman, Richard Lovecraft, H.P., 52, 53–54, 147–148, I 157, 179n5. See also “The Call of Illiad, 59. See also Homer Cthulhu”; “The Rats in the Walls” In the Tall Grass, 7, 146–148, 171, 179n5. See also Hill, Joe M Invasion of the Body Snatchers Macbeth, 59. See also Shakespeare, (film, 1956), 46 William Invasion of the Body Snatchers Machen, Arthur, 52–53. See also The (film, 1978), 46 Great God Pan Invasion of the Body Snatchers (novel), Madame Bovary, 122. See also Flaubert, 46. See also Finney, Jack Gustave IT (miniseries), 173 Magical Negro trope, 129–133, 184n4 IT (novel), 43, 182n1 magic realism, 98 Maleev, Alex, 158–160. See also J Stephen King’s N. Jackson, Shirley, 52 “The Man in the Black Suit” (short James, Henry, 122. See also Portrait of story), 172 a Lady Marvel Comics, 153, 158 “Jerusalem’s Lot,” 179n5 Matheson, Richard, 153, 164, 165, 166, Just After Sunset, 153, 156, 158 169. See also “Duel”; Hill, Joe; Road Rage; “Throttle” K McDowell, Michael, 122. See also Kindle, 4, 134, 137, 138, 140–143. Blackwater See also ebooks Medusa, 98–99 Kindle Singles, 79, 80, 83–84, 143, 145, Mellencamp, John, 171. See also Ghost 146, 149, 150, 151, 185n6. Brothers of Darkland County See also ebooks; A Face in the melodrama, 4 Crowd; Guns; In the Tall Grass; Meyers, Stephenie, 13, 21. See also Mile 81; UR Twilight Saga Kingdom Hospital, 173 Middlemarch (novel), 122. See also Kubrick, Stanley, 173, 174. See also The Eliot, George Shining (film) Mile 81 (ebook), 7, 143–145, 147, 185n4 L Minotaur, 100–101 le Fanu, Sheridan, 12. See also Carmilla Misery (film), 173 Last Dance, 183n3 The Mist (film), 173 Leaf, Munro, 100. See also The Story of The Mist (novella), 179n5 Ferdinand Mr. Mercedes (novel), 2, 172 Lee, Spike, 131, 184n4 monsters, 3, 4, 11, 13, 20–21, 24, 27, 43, The Legend of Bagger Vance, 184n4 45, 55, 58, 63, 73, 127, 147, 160, Leiber, Fritz, 52 185n4. See also The “Thing Without “Little Green God of Agony” (short a Name”; vampires; werewolves story), 153, 160–161, 164 “Morality,” 171 Little Green God of Agony (web comic), mythic hero, 104, 182n2. See also 7, 153, 154, 161–164, 169 Campbell, Joseph INDEX 209

N Plutarch, 59 “N.” (mobisodes), 158, 160. See also Polidori, John, 12. See also The Vampyre Stephen King’s N. (graphic novel) Portrait of a Lady, 122. See also “N.” (short story), 153, 156–158, 159, James, Henry 160. See also Stephen King’s N. pseudonym, 6, 38, 39, 53, 73, 178–179n8. (graphic novel) See also Bachman, Richard National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to R American Letters, 1–2 Rage, 6, 38, 73–85, 149, 172, 178n7, National Medal of Arts, 2 180n1, 185n7. See also Bachman, National Rifle Association (NRA), Richard; school shootings 80–81, 84, 149, 150 “The Rats in the Walls,” 148. See also Needful Things, 41 Lovecraft, H.P. “The Night Flier,” 6, 13, 18–21 The Regulators, 38, 73. See also Nightmares & Dreamscapes Bachman, Richard; Desperation (collection), 179n5 Reiner, Rob, 103, 173 Nightmares & Dreamscapes Resident Evil, 55 (television series), 173 Revival, 6, 46, 50–54, 58, 179n3 Night of the Living Dead, 13, 46 Riding the Bullet (ebook), 7, Night Shift, 17, 179n5 138–139, 140 Riding the Bullet (film), 180n3 O Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Obama, Barack, 2 Redemption (novella), Odyssey, 59, 100. See also Homer 126, 183n3 O’Nan, Stuart, 7, 140, 145–146, Road Rage (graphic novel), 7, 146, 185n5. See also A Face in the 153, 154, 164–169, 172. See also Crowd; Faithful: Two Diehard “Duel”; Hill, Joe; Matheson, Boston Red Sox Fans Richard; “Throttle” Chronicle the Historic Roadwork, 38, 73. See also Bachman, 2004 Season Richard “One for the Road,” 6, 13, 17–18 The Rock Bottom Remainders, 171 online publication, 7, 79, 139, 141 Rockwell, Norman, 109 On Writing: A Memoir of the Romero, George A., 13, 46, 55, 56. Craft, 171 See also Night of the Living Dead Orange Is the New Black, 135 Rose Madder, 6, 87, 88, 95–101, 172 Ossenfelder, Heinrich August, 11–12. Rose Red, 173 See also “The Vampire” The Running Man, 3, 38, 73 Ryall, Chris, 165. See also Road Rage P Rymer, James Malcolm, 12. See also penny dreadfuls, 12. See also Rymer, Varney the Vampire; or The Feast James Malcolm; Varney the of Blood Vampire; or The Feast of Blood Persephone, 99 S Pet Sematary, 6, 46–50, 52, 105, ’Salem’s Lot, 6, 13–17, 18, 25, 32, 58, 144 179n2 Sandy Hook Elementary School, 7, 76, The Plant, 139–140, 183n2 78, 79, 80, 81, 83–84, 140, 148, Pliny the Younger, 59 149, 171 210 INDEX

The Saturday Evening Post, 109, 122 Stephen King’s N. (graphic novel), schizophrenia, 37, 82, 178n4 7, 153, 154, 158–160, 169, 172, school shootings, 6, 7, 73–85, 172, 186n3 180–181n2. See also Columbine; Stoker, Bram, 6, 12, 13–17, 20, 22, 46, Sandy Hook Elementary School; 52, 55. See also Dracula Virginia Tech Storm of the Century, 173 Secret Window, Secret Garden, 6, 31, The Story of Ferdinand, 100. See also 36–38, 39, 41, 178n6 Leaf, Munro Serial, 133–134 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 122. See also serial publication, 7, 12, 121–135, 171, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 172, 183n2, 184n7. See also Straub, Peter, 52, 177n1 The Green Mile; The Plant structural theory of personality, sexual violence, 6, 14, 62, 65–66, 68, 27–31, 32, 35. See also Freud, 69–70, 73, 87–101, 110, 127, Sigmund 130, 150, 172, 180n4, 181n2, 184n5 T Shakespeare, William, 59, 96. See also technohorror, 35 Hamlet; Macbeth terrorism, 4, 55, 56, 57–58 The Shawshank Redemption (film), “That Bus Is Another World,” 171 1, 173–174, 183–184n3 Theseus, 100 Shelley, Mary, 6, 43–46, 47, 49, 52, 55, The “Thing Without a Name,” 5, 43–58. 179n1, 179n3, 179n4. See also See also monsters Frankenstein Thinner, 38, 73. See also Bachman, The Shining (film), 173, 174. See also Richard Kubrick, Stanley “Throttle” (comic), 165, 167–169. The Shining (miniseries), 64, 173 See also “Duel”; Hill, Joe; The Shining (novel), 3, 4, 6, 58, 61–65, Matheson, Richard; Road Rage; 70, 144, 173 “Throttle” (short story) The Simpsons, 173–174 “Throttle” (short story), 146, 153, Skeleton Crew, 179n5 164–165, 167–169, 172. See also small towns, 13, 14, 32, 177n1. See also “Duel”; Hill, Joe; Matheson, Castle Rock; Derry Richard; Road Rage “Snow White,” 98 Tolkien, J.R.R., 133. See also Snyder, Scott, 6, 21–25, 153. The Hobbit See also American Vampire, Tolstoy, Leo, 122. See also Volume 1 Anna Karenina Sookie Stackhouse series, 13, 21. The Tommyknockers, 43 See also Harris, Charlane; True Transparent, 135 Blood True Blood (TV series), 21. The Stand (graphic novel series), 7, See also Harris, Charlane; Sookie 153, 172 Stackhouse series The Stand (miniseries), 173, 180n3 Twain, Mark, 122. See also The Stand (novel), 3, 7, 143, 153–154, The Adventures of Huckleberry 172, 183n2 Finn Stand By Me (film), 103, 105, 173–174 28 Days Later, 55 INDEX 211

Twilight Saga, 13, 21, 133. See also Varney the Vampire; or The Feast of Meyers, Stephenie Blood, 12. See also Rymer, James The Twilight Zone, 143, 164 Malcom Virginia Tech, 76, 80–81 U visual literacy, 7, 154–155 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 122, 129. See also Stowe, Harriet Beecher W undead, 6, 12, 16, 17, 52, 62, 110, The Walking Dead, 46 172, 179n1 Walpole, Horace, 59. See also Under the Dome, 43, 183n2 The Castle of Otranto UR, 7, 140–143, 145, 184–185n3 werewolves, 5, 6, 11, 27–41, 43, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 172, 177n2 V Wolfe, Tom, 122. See also Bonfire of the “The Vampire,” 11–12. See also Vanities Ossenfelder, Heinrich August The Vampire Diaries, 21 Y vampires, 4, 5, 6, 11–25, 27, 32, 43, 55, “Young Goodman Brown,” 172. 57, 58, 59, 73, 153, 172 See also Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Vampyre, 12. See also Polidori, John Z Van Helsing, 12, 15, 16–17. See also Žižek, Slavoj, 46 Dracula; Stoker, Bram zombies, 13, 46, 54–58, 179n1